Talk:Click consonant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Phonetics, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to phonetics and descriptive phonology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Contents 1 word-initial 2 IPA 3 language groups 4 Kirshenbaum 5 sound samples 6 the accompaniments 7 Yeyi 8 tenuis 9 ‡Hõã 10 Origins 11 Orthographies

[edit] word-initial

only word-initial clicks: Not true. Xhosa and Zulu have lots of words with clicks in the middle, such as iqaqa (some stinky mustelid), uqhoqhoqho(Z)/uqhoqhoqha(Xh) (larynx), and esanqoba.

I believe it says that no initial OR FINAL clicks. Since isiZulu and isiXhosa are Bantu languages, all words end either in a vowel or in a nasal consonant, not clicks.

Be bold, go correct those errors! :) Dysprosia 10:04, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

[edit] IPA

In IPA transcription, the symbols ʘ, ǀ, ǁ, ǂ, and ! are used to represent bilabial, dental, alveloar lateral, alveolar, and retroflex clicks respectively.

Could someone with the appropriate font render these out as graphics?

Why not just use Unicode?

[edit] language groups

Hadza and Sandawe are languages, not "language groups", although if they are unrelated to any other language (and many linguists still regard them as Khoisan), they would by default be language _families_.

[edit] Kirshenbaum

While the quote about the Kirshenbaum system is verbatim, I have a problem with the section of the quote that says that the clicks are infrequent in the languages most often discussed (more than 50% of all words in !Kung begin with a click). Also, the reference to "IPA diacritics" could be misleading; there are no diacritics, but there are four full characters for clicks. That aside, I don't see how t! in the Kirshenbaum system is any less ambiguous than // in SAMPA. The use of SAMPA // is fine in most languages that use clicks, because two unaspirated voiceless clicks cannot appear next to each other in the Khoisan or the Bantu languages that use them. thefamouseccles

[edit] sound samples

Would it be possible for anyone to include a sound samples of these click consonants? I have read Manner_of_articulation, but as a north-american, I must say I am utterly incapable of following these instructions to make any sort of sound. UnHoly 23:22, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There are samples on bilabial click, dental click, lateral alveolar click, palatal click, and postalveolar click. They are produced by Peter Ladefoged, who deserves a page if he doesn't have one. Nohat 00:09, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

That helped a lot! Thanks. UnHoly 04:51, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There are also sound samples at the external link of ‡Hõã. kwami 04:20, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] the accompaniments

i just added the data, will someone please fix it up to table format? Benwing 08:48, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Sure, thanks for putting all that in. I've added a few more languages; except for Damin, they're all from L's articles in the UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics. ǂHõã is worth looking at for more accompaniments, as it's quite rich; I'll see if I can track down my papers. (I think the phonetics was done by Traill, who L relied on for his data.) !Ora might also be worth a look, and certainly N/u if anything is ever published. The Tshu-Khwe languages are pretty impoverished click-wise, so might not give us a lot that's new, but could help show what's more commonly found. kwami 19:53, 2005 July 22 (UTC)

Added some ‡Hõã as well, but it's from one of L's old html pages, and thus ASCII, so the identities really need to be verified. For example, what seemed by its transcription to be a uvular ejective sounds like a uvular followed by glottal stop, so I counted it as that. But my ear isn't good enough to be able to tell with many of them, and the sound quality isn't great. kwami 08:22, 2005 July 23 (UTC)

‡Hõã was actually from a Cornell website, which is now linked. Found a better description in Collins, which also included G|ui. kwami 03:45, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Yeyi

I am a South African and have never heard of a Southern African language called yeyi. If no one gets back to us soon I suggest we remove the listing.

Who said it was South African? Yeyi is spoken by about half an ethnic group of 50,000 in Botswana. 66.27.205.12 04:24, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] tenuis

please do not use "tenuis" as this is an obsolete term. Benwing 04:15, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, it probably is. But it's so much more convenient than "unvoiced unaspirated"! 66.27.205.12 04:24, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

there is usually no need to say "unaspirated". Benwing 05:57, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

"Unvoiced" as frequently used includes aspirated. Not important in English, but it is in languages with phonemic aspiration, as here. In the source material Ladefoged spelled it out as "unvoiced unaspirated" -- wording I always found tedious, which is why I changed it to tenuis. Don't blame you for objecting to that, but it's probably best to retain the original precision, especially with sounds as complex as these! kwami 06:07, 2005 July 24 (UTC)

[edit] ‡Hõã

I had added ‡Hõã some time ago, but my source was not very reliable. (It might not even be the right language!) Can anyone verify? If not, we should probably delete these entries. Seems a shame, though. kwami 21:58, 2005 August 31 (UTC)

Confirmed, with a few corrections. kwami 03:47, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Origins

any info on the origins of click consonants? It seems clear how many consonants in many languages are formed, and how they all are related to easy sounds for a baby to make, "b, p, m, d, t, n, g, k, ng" but how do clicks originate? I've noted among the nonsense cooing of babies some clicks happen, but how were these transferred into language? Does the world proto-language include clicks? How did they arise? etc. etc. Could they be evidence of language evolving indepedently in different parts of the world? --ChadThomson 05:20, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

No one knows. However, it seems likely that they're related to doubly articulated consonants. Labial-velars, for example, are easily transformed into implosives (if voiced) and ejectives (if voiceles), so a new airstream mechanism isn't necessarily problematic. In several languages, lateral clicks are easily confused with lateral affricates. kwami 22:18, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Orthographies

So clicks are represented in IPA like this, and in ASCII renderings of IPA like that, but how do the respective languages' orthographies deal with clicks? I guess most, if not all of them use the Latin alphabet when written, and this would have to have been innovated since the Romans didn't use clicks. My non–South African layman's impression is that the Bantu languages featuring clicks tend to use Latin letters like Q or C, or digraphs as in 'Xhosa', while Khoisan languages tend to use (in addition, since they have more clicks?) 'letters' like //, !, ', etc. (Is // a letter or a digraph? A ligature? How are these strange glyphs collated, eg in a Namibian phone book?) Could anyone enlighten me and other readers on this subject?

Good question about Namibian phonebooks. I don't know if there are even entries for these symbols. That's worth checking out. Most of the collation I've seen either places them at the beginning of the alphabet, or ignores them and collates according to the first Latin letter.

Few Khoisan languages are written on a regular basis. Nama is, and I believe Sandawe might be as well (I've heard elementary education is conducted in Sandawe), but I think that's about it. Nama at least uses the | || ! # system. || is not a digraph, but a separate letter, although it might have originally been iconically bipartite, representing the two sides. (! was originally | with the retroflex underdot diacritic; and the horizontal lines of the # might have indicated the palate?) The IPA came up with a separate set of symbols, more in keeping with the Latin alphabet, but reverted because the | || ! # system is nearly universal among Khoisanists and Khoisan literature. Bantu, of course, is restricted to the Latin alphabet for clicks. I don't think Yeyi is written, and I believe that is the only Bantu language with the palatal click. kwami 23:28, 29 October 2005 (UTC)