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This contribution concerns once again the name of Chan Chan, the largest pre-Hispanic city in the Americas. Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino has recently argued that the name should be etymologized through a combination of Quechua, which had a weak and short-lived presence on the Peruvian North Coast, and Aymara material, a language which had no known presence there at all. In addition to this major flaw, I discuss further problematic aspects of the proposal. Each of these would suffice to cast considerable doubt on the proposed etymology, but in conjunction they make it advisable to reject it outright. Instead, I continue to defend a methodologically conservative and cautious posture that I have already advocated in my earlier contribution to the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the eve of Spanish conquest, northern Peru is thought to have been home to a multitude of languages of relatively modest geographical extension, especially when compared with the widespread Quechuan and Aymaran languages. In this contribution, I suggest the possibility that a language or several languages relatively closely related to Cholón were spoken in a much wider part of northern Peru than that in which Cholón is historically attested. A prior "Cholonoid" area might have covered not only the western part of today's San Martín department, but also almost the entire department of Cajamarca as well as parts of La Libertad and Amazonas. This interpretation results from a triangulation of three independent lines of evidence, namely the toponymic record, substrate lexis in the local variety of Quechua at Chachapoyas, and typological properties of the extinct northern Peruvian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]