Last modified: 2025-06-19 by antónio martins
Keywords: wiphala | wipʼala | huipala | wiphalan |
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wiphala
"Unancha" means "flag"
in Quechua and "electrical signal" in Aymara; the mentioned
use of "unancha" in Aymara Wikipedia to mean "flag" seems
to have been due to a mistake in the
country
infobox template that included for some reason (wild
copy+paste the Quechua Wikipedia?) an alien word from Quechua,
as of 2006.10.
António Martins, 27 Mai 2008 and Oct 2006
As far as I can tell, "wiphala" is indeed the regular Aymara word for "flag", while "unancha" is the regular Quechua word for "flag". (Evidence of this is the Aymara Wikipedia article about the flag of Bolivia and the Quechua Wikipedia article about flags.)
However, the (Aymara) word "wiphala" is used in Quechua to refer specifically to any of the seven colored Inca flags — both the the rainbow Twantinsuyu flag and any of the 7×7 chequered flags of its nominal “four quarters”. (Evidence of this is the Quechua Wikipedia article about these flags.)
António Martins, 27 Mai 2008
The Indigenous banner is called
huipala […]
whipala […] wipahla.
Laila Holtet (of
tawantinsuyu.com),
09 Jul 2001
The spellings "whipala" and "Wipahla" seem to be influenced
by English and German, respectively, and are nothing more than typos.
(The same, in the realm of speech, for a putative pronounciation of this
"ph" as [f] and not [pʰ], misled by how some Romance conservative
orthographies render Hellenic borrowings including "φ".)
António Martins, 25 Oct 2017
Some sources (namely [qch9X], among
others), use the spelling "wip’ala" instead of the more
usual "wiphala". Both "h" and "’" are part of
most
Aymara orthographies, with different phonological values:
aspiration and ejectiveness. The form "wip’ala" may
reflect dialectal variation or be merely an error.
António Martins, 25 Oct 2017
The form "huipala" is typically a Castillian (“Spanish”)
rendering / interpretation of the [u̯]/[w] semivowel, which works well
for the Latin / Romance environment it was created for (or where it evolved
in), but not so much elsewhere: Many improvised “organic”
orthographies based on Castillian spelling, used in/for languages of the
Americas, Africa, and the Philippines, used "hu" at first to later
replace it within more suitable spelling conventions, and Aymara seems to
be one more of these cases. Curiously, the tables seems to have been turned,
as currently Castillian texts (such as the 2009 Bolivian
law) favour the Aymara spelling "wiphala" over
"huipala".
António Martins, 25 Oct 2017
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