Andean Aymara

Anyone who has looked at agglutinative languages like Aymara or Quechua has noticed that oftentimes a single word in such a language corresponds to an entire sentence in a Germanic or Romance one. Usually that agglutinative word is pretty big, containing a handful of both nominal and verbal morphemes – but sometimes even bisyllabic words require a paragraph-long explanation.

Consider, for example, the root tila- ‘to divide into small sections’, when affixed with the deverbative derivational morpheme from the subcategory of those which have to do with identifying spatial location or motion, -nuqa, known in this work as the diffuse morpheme, the result, the deceptively simple word tilanuqa has something to do with irrigation. More specifically, it conveys either (1) the splitting off of the water flow done by others who want to steal some siphon off some water for their plants or animals, or (2) an irrigation method in which the water flow down a canal is subdivided into small, narrow trenches, as in the illustration. First, the farmer digs the trenches which result in the water flow being directed into terrain I, and, after an appropriate amount of time passes, she blocks those trenches and digs new ones for terrain II. After a certain amount of time, she blocks the trenches for terrain II and unblocks those for terrain I, and continues this process until the land is sufficiently irrigated, thereby avoiding flooding and water damage to the crops.

The order to start working on this sort of construction is simply conveyed with the single imperative word, ¡Tilanaqam!

Special thanks to Edwin Banegas Flores for taking the time to originally explain what was meant by tilanaqam.