Poulet au Vinaigre’

in the 'chicken dish' served by Mr Robert Langdon, he turns himself out as a poor cook using as far as the Quechua 'chicken salad' is concerned the wrong ingredients. In trying to come up with an etymology of Proto-Quechua (PQ) * wallpa 'chicken', he breaks the word down into xva 'bird' and allpa 'ground, earth', postulating the original meaning of the compound to have been 'ground/earth bird'. (In doing so he is able to identify wa with Easter Island hua-hua 'tailless fowl' ? thus supporting Thor Heyerdahl's assumption of pre-Columbian Amerindian voyages to Polynesia.) As there is no Quechua word xva 'bird', Mr Langdon presents a long list of bird names with initial wafrom South and Mesoamerican languages as proof of such an earlier form. Naturally, among the names, to mention just two examples, wanako 'guanaco (the camel sheep)' and wangana 'mountain pig' are missing. (Naturally, the PQword for 'ground, earth' is * [h]allp'a ? to be reflected in some dialects by allpa.) However, first of all, the non-linguist should have restricted himself to his familiar porridge as his approach is wrong from the very beginning: The word-order of Quechua is rectum-regens (he might have realised this in referring to the place-name Pucallpa) so that a compound with the meaning 'ground/earth bird' would be *(h)allp'a 'ground/earth' -IX 'bird'! As for the Easter Island identification, he would have another chance to explain hua-hua as a reflex of wallpa: wallpa > wawa (? huahua)

Genealogy · Geography · Diverse multidisciplinary academic research · French Language Learning Methods · History · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies