The Interpretation of Relationships among Quechua Dialects

Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications. — 1985. — No. 20. — pp. 271—284 (15 стр.)In historical linguistics it is desirable to keep a balance between the details worked out by careful attention to methodology on the one hand, and the overall picture that emerges from those details on the other. Though the historical study of the Quechua dialects is not far advanced, there are measures of the mass effect of all known factors that give us the shape of the picture that is emerging there. This paper begins from lists of cognates compiled by Alfredo Torero and applies two grouping algorithms to his judgments. The first is in terms of simple links among the dialects, and the second in terms of optimal networks of dialects at different levels of association. Both results suggest that the different branches of Quechua A may be as distant from each other as any of them is from Quechua B.