Looking back over my fieldnotes recently I was amused by the following extract:
The vocabulary of Petrona's (the woman whose family I had been staying with) little girl, Tina, seems to have expanded ever so slightly recently. Occasionally I hear her say words like mamay (mum) or tatay (dad), but 90% of what she says still consists of three words: achachi (hot); kukuchi (scary thing), and zapato (shoe). The first two words are not used nearly as much as the last. She seems to be able to use the word as if it were at once a noun, verb, adjective, exclamation and every other form of grammatical form. This morning we were having soup for breakfast and she was repeating "zapato, zapato, zapato..." I decided to try to teach her a new word. "No es zapato" (it isn't a shoe), I told her, "es sopa" (it's soup). "Sopa", she replied, "sopa... to".
My efforts to expand Tina's vocabulary clearly hadn't met with success.
When reading for my thesis I came across some explanation for one of the other segments of Tina's vocabulary, kukuchi. According to Catherine Allen, in her article "Body and Soul in Quechua Thought" (1982:187), Kukuchis are "almas [souls] who, even after eight days, cannot free themselves from the dead body, and thus remain to molest the living". From Allen's description, kukuchis are disgusting, cannibalistic creatures who are especially likely to eat their closest relatives. I imagine that Petrona must have been scaring Tina with tales of kukuchis. It makes me wonder whether the reason she repeated the word so much in my presence (often, now that I think about it, whilst attempting to hide behind her mum's skirt) was that she took me as a kukuchi. She had probably even been telling Tina that if she didn't behave then I would eat her. Perhaps the reason that she was so obsessed with shoes was because she thought that she might need to run away as fast as her little legs could carry her when I became peckish for human flesh!
