The Word for Remembering and Thinking

A thought says: I remember. A moment later another says: I think so. In English, the two sound like two different acts. In several Quechua dialects of the Andes, one word, yuyay, covers both. KTT counts both as thoughts, noticed or not, even when they arrive as a faint pull toward the past. The sources read for this article are modern dictionaries and a few pages about the early colonial dictionaries. They do not include a Quechua text about thinking, and none of them tested how speakers use the word.

One word, several jobs

Yuyay is both a noun and a verb. As a verb it means different things in different places. In Cuzco Quechua it means to remember. In the Huaylas dialect of Áncash it means to think. In Ayacucho Quechua it means to devise or to come up with. As a noun, a modern Quechua-Spanish dictionary lists several senses: judgment, the faculty of judging, imagination, a memory of something past, the faculty of remembering and intellectual capacity. A related verb, yuyaychay, means to recall, and also to bring an idea before someone’s judgment so that the person holds it as their own.

A word for storing

In 2017, a symposium in Cusco took the name Yuyay Taqe, which its organizers translate as “storehouse of memory.” They use the word yuyay for the knowledge and recollections collected in a store. Here the word is used for something kept, and not only for something done in the moment.

The colonial filter

The earliest Quechua grammar and dictionary were made by the Dominican friar Domingo de Santo Tomás in 1560, and a larger dictionary by Diego González Holguín followed in 1608. Both were written by Spaniards, for Spaniards who wanted to teach Christianity. A study of another Quechua word, supay, shows that the early dictionaries sometimes pushed Andean ideas toward Christian ones, in that case toward the devil. Whether they did the same to yuyay is not something the sources read here say.

What is not known

How the word was used in Inca times is not known from these sources. The dictionaries are colonial and the modern ones record living dialects.

Whether remembering, thinking and judging felt like one act to Quechua speakers, or only share a word, is also not known.

What Quechua speakers themselves say about the word today is open. The sources read here are dictionaries and not interviews.