Written and published by Linden Alexander Pentecost on the 16th of June 2026, this article is unrelated to and separate from any and all of my other publications. This article was published in the UK and on this BookofDunBarra website and is the last article (of many many) to be published on this website, at number 109: , the last book (of many many) to be published on this website has already been published on this website a number of days ago, and another shortly before, I have published other articles on this website & elsewhere since publishing the two last books to be published on this website, and have published elsewhere too including on my unrelated Languages of Linnunrata website with unrelated content. No AI was used in this article on this page nor in any of my writings. This article contains a self portrait of myself, the author, which is relevant, and is also not the same self potrait as that I published yesterday in an unrelated blog post on my Languages of Linnunrata website. This BookofDunBarra will not be closed yet, and edits will be made to some of the content, but this article on this page is the last to be published on this website. I hope this article is interesting, it covers several things and also helps to give an idea of how this website came to be, and also includes some linguistic work not previously published. This article contains a total of 1760 words. 

I began working on this website back in the autumn of 2021, after I had returned home from Finland. Some of the material published in the books published via this website (not the html articles on the website), was already part-made years before I made this website, and some parts of that older material were also published elsewhere, but never in any permanent form. 

The reason that I named the website itself “The Book of DunBarra” is in part connected to Dunbar in Scotland, and partially in connection to John Dunbar, known as the man of Scottish descent who befriended the Sioux, and this is an important reason as this website is in many ways partially about connecting European linguistic and mythological history to that of the Americas and elsewhere. But another reason I chose the name “Book of DunBarra” has to do with the Isle of Barra in Scotland and, specifically with my second to last night on my first visit to the island back in 2011. 

I sat opposite a small island close to Castlebay on Barra, the island being not far from Leideag. By this point in my life I had already been writing and publishing a little on languages. And I wanted to publish and do more. And when sat in that spot opposite that island, on that evening, I conceived of a basic plan. The plan was to create something like the following: 

.A book on Celtic languages - Gaulish, Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Cumbric, Manx Gaelic, Irish, Scottish Gaelic - and Scottish Gaelic dialects. 

.A book on Nordic languages - Icelandic, Faroese, Shetland Norn, Orkney Norn, Danish, Swedish, Jämtlandic, Bondska, Norwegian, Trøndersk 

.A book on other languages - Greenlandic, Navajo, Sioux, Mayan languages, Quechuan languages, Aymara, a little on Chinese, Japanese and Salishan languages like Nuxalk, Finnish, Northern Sámi, Lule Sámi.

At the time on the island I knew that Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian and Finnish truly felt like “my” languages. I felt on some level also that the Norn language was one I wanted to speak better - and I have come to, as much as is possible. I remember when on Barra studying a bit of Trøndersk and reading the poem in Orkney Nynorn called “Sjuin ir ens og glerlek”. 

The next night, my last night on Barra, was bizarre, but I won't go into that here. The point is that I came back from Barra, spent the next ten years doing a lot of stuff, a lot of writing and research, and then I created this website in the autumn of 2021, just over ten years after my first trip to Barra. 

I have written and created a lot, published on, or via this website or elsewhere. The book ideas I had back in 2011 never became so specifically exact as my vague vision of them back then, but all the topics I wanted to include, I have written and published about, along with so, so much more. And it is kind of exciting and interesting how this vision and idea has come true. For the second part of this article I wanted to include some things that I wrote many years ago, the first of which I wrote in 2011 and which has not yet since been republished since being published on a facebook profile I had back in 2011, it is a basic explanation of some Quechua grammar and is all in italics. Note that I have published an awful lot on Quechua and an awful lot on Finnish-Quechua similarities and other topics related, and much more, since writing this below. Later comments are not in Italics. After this part is a photo description and photo followed by some more writing.

Quechua is not one language, more like a group of closely related, but differing languages, spoken across several countries in the Andean region of South America. Most of the Quechua I have learnt is that spoken around Cuzco in Peru, which is famous for its monuments built by the Incas themselves and their ancestors; so that is what I'll use here :) (I later learned this dialect much better in 2023).

Basically, Quechua is a very polysynthetic language, so it requires few words to express something. For example, in English we have postpositions, e.g. 'my' 'this' 'the' 'of' 'to' 'against'. All these words come before nouns e.g.

my house

this house

of the house

to the house

against the house

Quechua requires no articles (words for 'a' or 'the' - although the word 'uh' has been borrowed from Spanish). Quechuan speakers express the concepts we use these prepositions for, in the form of suffixes.

So for example:

llaqta - town

llaqtay - my town

llaqtaypi - in my town

llaqtakuna - towns (plural)

llaqtaykunapi - in my towns

So, from this we learn that we use the suffix -y to express 'my' in Quechua. Other examples:

wasiy - my house (from wasi - ”house”)

llamay - my lama (from llama - ”llama”)

-pi is a locational suffix meaning 'in' or 'at'.

wasipi - in a house/in the house

This is indeed quite simple compared to other native American languages, I think because Quechua is quite unusual amoungst the languages of South America, having probably come from further North, and inherited words from South American languages. (This is not my present day conclusion at all but nevertheless Quechua is unusual among indigenous South American languages and certainly has links to further north and elsewhere, e.g. Europe, Polynesia, Eurasia, Finland in particular I think. But when I wrote the above in italics in 2011 I had no idea about Finnish and Quechua similarities). 

Photo below: a self potrait of the author (not the same as another self potrait that I published elsewhere yesterday in au unrelated blog post), the photo below was taken on my first trip to Barra in 2011, note the happiness on my face and the sacred Hebridean light of the western sun, looking sacred upon my face. The photo below is I think poetic and says something about the mystical nature of Barra which I have always felt.