Official Aymara Alphabet "Único"After many years of meetings, propositions and discussions the government of Bolivia issued the decree 20227-DS (Decreto Supremo) at May 9, 1984, recognizing the Aymara Official Alphabet called as Único. This alphabet was ratified by the government of Perú by issuing the decree 1218-RM (Resolución Ministerial) at November 18, 1985. This alphabet can be considered as a combination of the good ones proposed by, the Bolivian native speaker and linguist, Juan de Dios Yapita and by, the American Catholic Congregation, Maryknoll (see the Table II below).
The official Aymara alphabet is a system with twenty-six (26)
consonants and three (3) vowels. This alphabet is considered as
phonemic because each considered Aymara phonem has an unique
symbol representing it. Obviously this system is not a perfect one,
there are many phonemes, of the different Aymara dialects, which are not
represented. But, it is known that there is not any language, in the world,
with a one-to-one correspondence between their phonemes and the letters of
their respective alphabet. Therefore ortographical conventions, like this
alphabet, are necessary rules.
In the Spanish alphabet, on which is based the Aymara alfabet, the letters k and q are two different representations of the same phoneme /k/. This fact can be noticed in the left side figure, where the Aymara phonemes /k/ and /q/ are produced at different articulation locals: velar and postvelar. This can be verified by listening the sound files digitalized in mp3 format, merged into the Table I. Download the kanka and qaqa files and play them, you will notice the difference between /k/ and /q/. Moreover, the Table I shows the Aymara alphabet in accordance the articulation local, as the figure, and also in accordance the way in which this articulation is made (plain occlusives, aspirated occlusives, etc.).
Elementar ortography
Another alphabetsPedro Cieza de Leon tell us when the spaniards arrived in the Titicaca plateau, by the second half of the XVI century, they found the most populous area inside the Inca empire. All these people living around the Titicaca lake spoke Aymara. In the very beginning of the XVII century the italian jesuit Ludovico Bertonio invented a written code for the Aymara language and in 1603 he published the first diccionary/grammar for Aymara. In spite of its four centuries this work along two companion books are the fundamentals of any serious study on Aymara language. Many words found in this work are no more used now because of the influence of quechua and, mainly the spanish. Since the living Aymara language is seriuosly endangered, we think the work of Bertonio is one of the best fonts for a possible preservation in a sound recorded system. But in the Bertonio's days there was not a phonetics science. Furthermore, for almost all the europeans, some aspirated and glottalized sounds of the Aymara( and also quechua ) were not correctly listened. For this and other reasons arose more than 30 different propositions to be the Aymara alphabet.
In the Table II is shown the equivalence between the 8 most important
alphabets of Aymara. The history of these alphabets began with the Bertonio's
one in 1603. After that, the german philologist Ersnest Middendorf proposed its
system in 1891. The Comisión de Alfabetización y Literatura Aymara -
C.A.L.A. of Bolivia mostly with non aymara members proposed a system in
1968. Both the three systems of Bertonio and Middendorf and CALA had problems
with the postvelar sounds and the vowels near them. Also they have more than 26
phonemes and 5 vowels. In 1965 Juan Enrique Ebbing presents the first system
with 26 phonemes. In 1968 Juan de Dios Yapita who is a native speaker and a
linguist trained by the American linguist M. J. Hardman presents its
revolutionary phonemic system with 26 phonemes and three vowels. The Aymara
language debt with the professor Hardman is enormous. She also stablished that
the Aymara belongs to a family which she called Jaqi. The other members
of this family are the Jaqaru and the Kawki spoken, until today,
in the towns of Tupe and Cachuy, province of Yauyos to 300 kilometers SE of
Lima city. As expected these brothers of Aymara are on the verge of
disapearence. The American based Maryknoll Chatolic Congregation which first
published in aymara by using the CALA system created its own alphabet in 1975.
The Maryknoll alphabet is as good as the Yapita's one. Because that the
official alphabet can be considered as combination of the Maryknoll and
Yapita systems, it is shown in the Table II. Although this, the Bolivian
mathematician Ivan Guzman de Rojas, into its work on the trivalent logic of
the Aymara, also proposed its own alphabet (1984).
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