LCT JOURNAL 2020
Sweet Songs and Soft Hearts: 1 Metaphors in Cuzco Quechua Rosalind Owen 1 Introduction 1.1 Quechuan Culture With a history rich in mythology, poetry, and unique forms of arithmetic, Quechuan culture lends itself to a transdisciplinary approach to modeling the world, based in its mythopoetic roots (Urton and Llanos 1997; Almeida and 2 Haidar 2012). In a case study of Ecuadorian Quechua, Almeida and Haidar argue that these roots create a cognitive continuity between nature, culture, science and religion not found in Indo-European languages (2012). Traditionally, space and time have been conceptualized as a spatiotemporal unit, and in (Almeida and Haidar 2012). Nature terms have infused metaphorical and spiritual meanings in addition to their literal meanings. Examples in modern Quechua are shown in (1a-b). (1) a. orkob. patʃa-mama mountain mountain-mother “mountain/god”[Dative, 128] “earth” (holy centre/core of Earth) A point of contention is whether Quechua has a conceptualization of space-time that runs in the opposite direction (2a-b) to that of space-time metaphors in languages like English, in which the future is “behind” the speaker and the past is “in front of” them (Almeida and Haidar 2012). The logic is that the past can be seen, while the future is unknown and unseen. (2) a. “ñaupa”b. “kay”c. “k’ipa” past, and forward present, and here future, and behind While idioms in Quechua of the Peruvian Andes in the domains of “distress and suffering” have been documented for psychological study within cultural context, figurative language has not been thoroughly studied in the Quechuan languages (Pederson, et al., 2010). 1.2 Theory in Metaphor Conceptual metaphor theory claims that metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression but a result of cognitive processes that link concepts in the mind (Cameron and Maslen 2010). The metaphor links two domains, drawing on a more concrete concept to describe a more abstract one (Lakoff and Turner 1989). For instance, physical location can describe time as in (3). A domain is a cloud of entities, attributes, and relationships stored in the mind. Metaphor can add structure to, distort, or highlight the target domain and creates a “common conceptual apparatus” for a culture (Cameron and Maslen 2010; Lakoff and Page 13
