The Project of Catherine II and the Spanish Crown: Lexical-Typological Lists of Quechua and Aymara Which Never Reached Their Destination

The empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, launched a project of comparing the lexicon of all the major languages of world; she herself compiled over 400 words representing basic Russian vocabulary in 1785. Her dictionary Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparata (A Comparative Vocabulary of All World Languages) was printed by Peter Simon Pallas in Saint Petersburg in 1789. Lists of Quechua & Aymara words compiled for this project, but never included in the dictionary, are preserved in the General Archives of the Indies in Sevilla, Spain. The manuscript contents of the codices containing the lists are described, & the vocabulary is presented & commented on in the following lexical-semantic fields: (1) kinship terms, (2) human body parts, (3) senses, sensory & physiological acts & human actions, (4) personal pronouns & the present & past tense conjugation of the verb cai/cancana 'to be', (5) common activities & notions, (6) common qualities & color terms, (7) natural & atmospheric phenomena, (8) dimensions & shapes, (9) human activities, (10) the animal kingdom, (11) household items & lifestyles, (12) grammatical words, & (13) numerals. 1 Appendix, 40 References. Z. Dubiel