Catacao dialect

Earlier works

Around 1596, Bishop of Quito Luis López de Solís commissioned catechisms and grammars to be written for the Indigenous languages of his diocesis, including "la lengua […] tallana", but it is uncertain if these works were ever produced.^[2]

The "plan" of Martínez Compañón

Catacao is known entirely from a 43-word list in a document referred to as the "plan" collected by Martínez Compañón between 1782 and 1785. The "plan" is part of a larger work, known as the Codex Martínez Compañón, detailing life in colonial Peru. Notably, the work also contains a number of watercolors, which were captioned by Martínez Compañón's personal secretary Pedro Agustín de Echevarri, who presumably also wrote down the "plan".

There are two copies of the "plan", one held in Bogotá and the other in Madrid. Both copies include 43-word lists for the Quechua, Mochica (Yunga), Sechura, Colán, Catacaos, Culli, Hibito and Cholón languages, as well as Spanish. The Colán and Catacaos languages are generally subsumed under the name Tallán, and they are closely related, probably dialects of a single language. The two versions of the "plan" have certain differences from each other, particularly in the spelling of the transcriptions.

A number of diacritics are employed in the vocabularies. Their meaning is not elaborated upon in the "plan", although certain diacritics are employed in only some of the languages, and are apparently not merely decorative in purpose. Notably, the Colán list uses numerous diacritics, whereas the Catacaos list has almost none. This may be due to the vocabularies collected by different authors.^[1]