306 3 The Inca Sphere
The formation of the indicative mood in Jaqaru involves the use of the affixes -k- and
-w-,which respectively indicate simultaneousness and previousness.
100
Both markers
suppress a preceding vowel except for -w-when it is itself followed by a consonant. The
use of these affixes is interrelated with that of a marker -q
h
(a)- referring to repetition
or restitution. The latter can either precede the simultaneous event affix or follow the
previous event affix. In combination with a verb not otherwise marked for tense, subordi-
nation or nominalisation, the presence of -k-isinterpreted as present tense, whereas -w-
refers to past tense. There is also the option of an unmarked form which neither contains
-k- nor -w-.Itisnot very frequent, except in verbalised expressions and in verbs with
the repetition marker -q
h
(a)-; cf. Hardman (1983a: 91) and example (196) above.
The ‘transitional’ verbal endings that indicate person of subject and object in Jaqaru
are formally related to their Aymara counterparts, but they present an additional option.
The ending -uˇsta is reserved for a subject in the second person acting upon an object
in the fourth person ‘you–us’. (Conversely, 4S.2O does not exist.) One might expect
this 2S.4O combination to be logically excluded given the fact that the fourth person
has been interpreted as the sum of the first and second persons (cf. section 3.3.4). In a
discussion of the personal reference systems of the Aymaran languages, Hardman (1975:
448) contrasts this characteristic Jaqaru combination with the situation in Aymara, where
her consultants considered it a ‘semantic impossibility.’
101
The ending -uˇsta is related
to Aymara -ista,which is used to indicate the transition 2S.1O (‘you–me’). The latter
combination is expressed in Jaqaru by means of an ending -uta, possibly a cognate of -ita
of the Aymara imperative paradigm. Also worth mentioning is the ending -ima,which
indicates a first-person subject and a second-person object (Aymara -sma). The Jaqaru
non-future indicative personal reference paradigm is represented in table 3.14.
In addition to the unmarked tense just introduced, Jaqaru has two remote tenses, a
near-remote past and a far-remote past. The distinction between the two is again reflected
by the presence of the markers -k- (in the near remote) and -w- (in the far remote). If the
subject is third person and there is no morphologically encoded object, the ending can
either be -ana or -ata. The latter is used for information from hearsay and in combinations
with the repetitive marker -q
h
(a)- (only allowed after -w-). If the subject is either not third
person, or it is part of an explicit subject–object transition, the endings in table 3.14 are
used with the following additions. An element -Vh- with a harmonically variable vowel
is inserted after the markers -k- or -w-, and before the personal endings. This element is
obligatory if the personal ending begins with a consonant (1S, 2S, 4S and 3S.2O), and
optional if it begins with a vowel (1S.2O, 2S.1O, 2S.4O, 3S.1O, 3S.4O). In contrast, the
100
The common denominations for these two markers are ‘present’ and ‘past’ (Hardman 1966,
1983a; Belleza Castro 1995). These denominations do not seem adequate because both markers
can occur in other temporal contexts as well.
101
Speakers of Cauqui do accept the combination, but a formal difference between 2S.4O and
2S.1O is maintained only in the future tense (Hardman 1975).