composed his grammar, calling the language Yunca, which is the Quichua name for the people of the coast, the Mochica of Oré. It was printed at Lima in 1644, and is very rare. There is a copy in the British Museum which belonged to Ternaux Compans. William Humboldt had a manuscript copy made, which is at Berlin. There is one copy in Peru, belonging to Dr. Villar, for which he gave £25. We are, therefore, deeply indebted to Dr. Gonzalez de la Rosa for having recently edited a reprint. Dr. Middendorf has also translated and edited Carrera's grammar, adding several vocabularies and words collected at Eten.[1] It was in this little coast village, where the people were famous for their manufacture of straw hats, that the Mochica language lingered down to recent times.
There was another language in the northern coast valleys, which Calancha calls Sec. In 1863 Mr. Spruce collected thirty-seven words of this language, then still spoken at Colan, Sechura, and Catacaos. They have not the remotest resemblance to equivalent words in the Mochica, Chibcha, or Atacama languages.[2]
The Mochica language is entirely different from Quichua, both as regards words and grammatical construction. It has three declensions depending on the termination of the noun in a consonant,
