Click letter

Various letters have been used to write the click consonants of southern Africa. The precursors of the current IPA letters were created by J. G. Krönlein,^[1] popularized by Karl Richard Lepsius,^[2][3] and continued by Wilhelm Bleek.^[4]

Also influential were Clement Doke^[5][6] and Douglas Beach,^[7] who used a different system that partially paralleled the IPA from 1921 to 1989.

Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or more strictly on the Latin alphabet. Clicks written with Latin letters such as c q x ç have case forms; when written with the Lepsius pipe letters ǀ ǃ ǁ ǂ they do not.

Multiple systems

The clicks of Xhosa, in the Lepsius alphabet of 1854. The ⟨ṅ⟩ is equivalent to ⟨ŋ⟩. The pipe with the acute accent was soon replaced with ⟨ǂ⟩.

By the early 19th century, the otherwise unneeded letters c q x were used as the basis for writing clicks in Zulu by British and German missions.^[8] However, for general linguistics this was confusing, as each of these letters had other uses. There were various ad hoc attempts to create letters—often iconic symbols—for click consonants, with the most successful being that of Krönlein popularized by Lepsius. Doke later created a different system, based graphically on the IPA letters of 1921 and theoretically on an empirically informed conception of the nature of click consonants. The only other system that has seen wide use is Kirshenbaum, an ASCII substitute for the IPA, which has been used in transcribing Damin.

The Nama name ǁhapopen ǀoas (ʖhapopen ʇʔoas), from Beach's phonology.

The Khoekhoe word ǂgaeǂui (⨎ae-⨎ʔui), illustrating Beach's distinctive form of the letter ǂ.

The Khoekhoe word ǁnau, illustrating the curled tail Beach used to indicate nasal clicks. These modified letters never made it into the IPA.

The 1925 Doke orthography for ʗhũ̬ː (!Xũ). Note that "alveolar" (2nd column) corresponds to modern palatal [ǂ]. The letters in the first, third and fifth columns had earlier been used for Zulu. The voiced dental click has the letter ⟨ɣ⟩ that would later be used by the IPA for a voiced velar fricative.
Though not clear from this image, the descenders on the nasal clicks that bend to the right bear rings, while those that bend to the left are tails as in IPA ŋ and ɲ. That is, the nasal click letters are, respectively, n with a ring on the right leg, ŋ with a ring on the left leg, n with a ring on the left leg, ɲ with a ring on the right leg, and n with rings on both legs.

Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a pipe for Lepsius, modifications of Latin letters for Doke and Beach), there was a conceptual difference: Lepsius used one letter as the base for all click consonants of the same place of articulation (called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for the manner of articulation (called the 'efflux'), treating them as two distinct sounds (the click proper and its accompaniment),^[21] whereas Doke used a separate letter for each tenuis, voiced, and nasal click, treating each as a distinct consonant, and thus following the example of the Latin alphabet, where the voiced and nasal occlusives also treated as distinct consonants (p b m, t d n, c j ñ, k g ŋ). Kirshenbaum differs from either in using a generic ⟨ǃ⟩ for all clicks, with a preceding letter to indicate both place and manner.

Doke's nasal-click letters were based on the letter ⟨n⟩, continuing the pattern of the pulmonic nasal consonants ⟨m ɱ n ɲ ɳ ŋ ɴ⟩. For example, the letter for the dental nasal click is ⟨ȵ⟩; the alveolar is similar but with the curl on the left leg, the lateral has a curl on both legs, and the retroflex and palatal are ɲ, ŋ with a curl on their free leg: . The voiced-click letters are more individuated, a couple were simply inverted versions of the tenuis-click letters. The tenuis–voiced pairs were ⟨ʇ ɣ⟩ (the letter ⟨ɣ⟩ had not yet been added to the IPA for the voiced velar fricative), ⟨ʗ 𝒬⟩, ⟨ѱ ⋔⟩, similarly ⟨ↆ⟩ and its inverse, and lateral ⟨ʖ⟩ paired with a double loop (an inverted ꔛ): . A proposal to add Doke’s letters to Unicode^[22]is not yet decided finally (as of October 2013, Unicode version 6.3).

Beach wrote on Khoekhoe and so had no need for letters for the voiced clicks; he created letters for nasal clicks by adding a curl to the bottom of the tenuis-click letters: double-barred ⟨ↆ⟩ for nasal ⟨⨎⟩, stretched ⟨ɕ⟩ for nasal ⟨ʗ⟩, turned ⟨ȶ⟩ for nasal ⟨ʇ⟩ (though with the curl on the bottom), and something like a topless ⟨ʓ⟩ for nasal ⟨ʖ⟩: .

Doke and Beach both wrote aspirated clicks with an h, ⟨ʇh ʗh ʖh ⨎h⟩, and the (nasalized) glottalized clicks with a glottal stop, ⟨ʇʔ ʗʔ ʖʔ ⨎ʔ⟩.^[23]

Evolution of phonetic transcription

Doke had run "admirable" experiments establishing the nature of click consonants. Nonetheless, Bleek in his highly influential work on Bushman languages rejected Doke's orthography on theoretical grounds, arguing that Doke's letters stood for two sounds each, "a combination of the implosive sound with the sound made by the expulsion of the breath" (that is, influx plus efflux), and that using Doke's orthography it was impossible to write the clicks themselves, as "we cannot call [them] either unvoiced, voiced, or nasal."^[24] Bleek therefore used digraphs based on the Lepsius letters, as Lepsius himself had done for the same reason. Ironically, linguists have since taken the co-articulation to be inherent in the Lepsius (pipe) letters, since the 'influx' can never occur alone, and therefore use the simple letters for the tenuis clicks rather than for some abstract 'clickness' as Bleek had. However, since the Lepsius letters have become standard (and even when the Doke letters were official in the IPA, only the letters for the tenuis clicks had been adopted, being treated as conceptually equivalent to the Lepsius alphabet), today if linguists wish to reflect the dominant view, and to use the IPA, they must resort to diacritics that would not be used for non-click consonants.

Summarized below is the evolution of formal click transcription, from Bleek's digraphs reflecting co-articulated consonants, to ligatures intended to function as single letters, to full IPA with diacritics, along with an equivalent treatment of the tenuis, voiced, and nasal non-click occlusives [t d n] (for illustrative purposes).^[25]

Local orthographies

Written languages with clicks generally use an alphabet either based on the Lepsius alphabet, with multigraphs based on the pipe letters for clicks, or on the Zulu alphabet, with multigraphs based on c q x for clicks. In the latter case, there have been several conventions for the palatal clicks. Some languages have had more than one orthography. For example, Khoekhoe has had at least the following, using palatal clicks as an example:

Local roman orthographies have been based on the following sets of letters:

There are two principal conventions for writing the manners of articulation (the 'effluxes'), which are used with both the Lepsius and Zulu orthographies. One uses g for voicing and x for affricate clicks; the other uses d for voicing and g for affricate clicks. Both use n for nasal clicks, but these letters may come either before or after the base letter. For simplicity, these will be illustrated across various orthographies using the lateral clicks only.

References