Analog SFF, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  [Note 8. There are less than a dozen surviving N/u speakers, all in their seventies and eighties.]

  What is a click? Linguists call any blocking of the air stream a constriction, any complete blocking of the air stream a closure. For example, the sounds represented by p and b are produced by a closure of the two lips, while f is produced by a constriction of the lower teeth against the upper lip. All clicks have two closures: one in the back of the mouth, the area where k and g are made, or even further back, and one more forward, the suction sound of the click proper. In producing the click, the air trapped between the two closures is rarefied as the tongue changes its shape, and when the forward closure is released, air rushing into the enclosed space produces the sharp sound we perceive as a click.

  When describing clicks, linguists refer to the more forward closure as the click type and to the back closure as the click accompaniment. Clicks are classified according to the position of the forward closure and whether or not there is friction. Traditionally, there are five clicks, though at least three more have been identified in Northern Khoesan languages[9]. From the front of the mouth back, the traditional click types are: labial, dental, palatal, alveolar, and lateral.

  [Note 9. For a description of one of the newly described clicks, see the (quite technical) paper by Miller and Sands (2000). Also for current work updating the concept of click accompaniment see Miller, Brugman, Sands, Namaseb, Exter, Collins, unpublished.]

  The labial click, written as a circle with a dot inside, is produced by pressing the lips together (combined with the posterior closure and air rushing in phenomena that characterize all clicks). Found only in Southern Khoesan and the isolate

  , the labial click is sometimes called the “kiss” click, though as Anthony Traill points out, it wouldn't be pleasant to be kissed by lips with that shape (see the photo on page 105 of Traill, 1985).

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  Table 2: Consonant System of Khoekhoegowap

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  The dental click, written[10] with a slash (/), is produced by sucking the front of the tongue away from the upper front teeth. As I mentioned earlier, this is the click represented by English tsk-tsk. The palatal click, written with a slash though parallel bars

  , is produced by cupping the front of the tongue on the area just behind the teeth. Since the area of contact for clicks is unusually large compared to other kinds of stops, these positions are only approximate. In fact, cineradiographic studies and other techniques show that what distinguishes clicks is more the shape and location of the air pocket formed.

  [Note 10. The Khoesan words in this article are cited in the orthography used in the published dictionaries; for example, Ju/'hoan words are in Dickens’ orthography. The click symbols discussed on p. 41 are those currently used in IPA (the set of symbols for transcribing languages recommended by the International Phonetic Association) but other symbols are used. Some readers may be familiar with Zulu/Xhosa usage where /, ! and // are written c, q, x.]

  The alveolar click (!) is formed with the tongue tip on the hard ridge just behind the teeth. The lateral click (//), sometimes used by English-speakers to urge horses to move, is formed with the right[11] side of the tongue drawn away from the upper right teeth. The alveolar and palatal clicks are abrupt clicks, while the labial, dental, and lateral clicks are produced with a much greater degree of friction.

  [Note 11. Typically on the right side but this varies with the individual much as handedness does.]

  The click accompaniment can be modified in various ways allowing different series of clicks to be formed. This is analogous to the way in which non-click consonants form various series: voiceless, voiced, aspirated, and so on; compare Tables 1 and 2. Table 2 shows the consonant system of Khoekhoegowap, a Central Khoesan language spoken by the Nama and Damara. Non-clicks are to the left; clicks to the right (the orthography is the traditional one for Khoekhoe).

  Khoekhoegowap is the language of the Nama and Damara peoples, traditionally pastoralists herding sheep and cattle rather than hunter-gatherers as most speakers of Khoesan languages were in the past. Unusually for a Khoesan tongue, Khoekhoegowap has been a written language for almost a century and has a standard orthography. Table 2 uses this orthography. The symbols in parentheses (b, d, g) are used for words beginning with a low tone; phonetically they are the same as p, t, k. The x represents a fricative sound like the ch in German ach. The apostrophe represents a glottal stop like the sound in some peoples’ pronunciation of Hawa'i or in the type of lava called ‘a'a. All Khoekhoegowap words that don't begin with another consonant begin with a light glottal stop, not written in the traditional orthography.

  There are four clicks and five types of accompaniment. The clicks in the top row are followed by a light glottal stop; those in the second row are plain voiceless clicks with the posterior closure in the same position as k. The third-row clicks are aspirated, that is to say, followed by a puff of air with the proviso that some of the air passes through the nose before the click is released. Clicks in the fourth row are, depending on the speaker, either strongly aspirated or followed by the fricative ach sound. Finally, the clicks in the fifth row are nasalized.

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  Table 3: Examples of Ju/'hoan vocabulary

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  Khoekhoegowap, with only thirty-two consonants and eight vowels (the a, e, i, o, u of classic Latin or Spanish and three nasal vowels) has one of the simplest sound systems of any click language. Most Khoesan languages are much more complex. Ju/'hoan, for example, a Northern Khoesan language spoken by some 20,000 people in Botswana, and Namibia, has forty-five non-click and fifty-two click consonants, a total of ninety-seven.

  , a Southern Khoesan language spoken by about 3,000 people, has even more.

  Much of the additional complexity is in the click system. Ju/'hoan has four clicks and thirteen types of click accompaniment. In addition to the accompaniments found in Khoekhoegowap, Ju/'hoan distinguishes voiced and voiceless clicks, has three different kinds of aspirated click, an ejective click pronounced with extra-strong friction, and a number of voiceless clicks preceded by a brief period of voicing. This last distinction, found also with the non-click consonants, seems to be unique in the world's languages. Table 3 presents some examples of Ju/'hoan words.

  The examples are given in the orthography accepted by the Ju/'hoan, who are beginning to produce their own written materials. As Table 3 demonstrates, Khoesan vocabulary isn't limited to concepts that we, from our high-tech viewpoint, might consider appropriate to “primitives"; contemporary Khoesan speakers have borrowed or created words for modern concepts. At the same time, they may make precise distinctions not available in English without paraphrase such as

  "sip a hot drink” vs. qom “sip a cold drink” or !'uni “antecubital fossa, i. e. inside of the elbow” vs.

  "elbow."

  Although Ju/'hoan has the same five oral and three nasal vowel types as Khoekhoegowap, its vowel system is nevertheless far more complex due to the use of a number of distinct vowel “colorings,” which can be very striking to a non-Khoesan ear.

  Nasalization is a simple example of vowel coloring. As a vowel is produced, the velum, the tag of flesh that closes off the nasal passages from the mouth, is raised, permitting some of the air current to escape through the nose. The nasal passages act as a resonating chamber, imparting a distinctive coloring to the vowel.

  All of the Khoesan languages have nasalized vowels. Some of them also superimpose on the oral/nasal contrast. Others contrast based on differences in the way voicing is produced or changes in the shape of the vocal tract.

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  Table 4: Vowel types in Ju/'hoan

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  Ju/'hoan has four series of vowels: modal, breathy, laryngealized, and pharyngealized. In English and indeed all languages, vowels generally have the type of voicing called modal voicing in which the vocal cords vibrate as a whole. But it is also possible to hold the arytenoid cartilages[12] ste
ady while allowing the rest of the vocal cords to vibrate, producing a softer, more hoarse type of voicing called “breathy voicing” or sometimes “voiced whisper.” This type of voicing can be observed in English in the way many people pronounce an intervocalic h as in “ahead.” This is sometimes called a voiced h, but the voicing here is produced in a way quite different from the way in which vowels are normally voiced.

  [Note 12. The arytenoid cartilages are a pair of small three-sided pyramids attached to the larynx, functioning to tense or relax the vocal cords.]

  If the vocal cords are brought together, cutting off the air stream, and then allowed to vibrate again, the voiceless hiatus in the vowel is known as a glottal stop and in many languages functions as a consonant. In some interjections in English such as the negative “uh-uh” or the “oh-oh” of self-reproach, there is a perceptible glottal stop between the syllables. If the vocal cords are tightened to a point where they are not quite touching in an almost-glottal stop, the creaky quality (something like having a scratchy voice at the beginning of a cold) imparted to the vowel is called laryngealization. In Ju/'hoan, vowels can also be laryngealized.

  The space between the pharyngeal wall and the back of the tongue is called the pharynx and if the tongue is bunched in such a way as to retract the tongue root, it produces a type of vowel called pharyngealized. The acoustic effect of this in Ju/'hoan is to give the vowel a distinctive strangled quality. Pharyngealized vowels can also be laryngealized, adding a fifth series of vowel quality; and since all of these can be either oral or nasal, the resulting vowel system is one of marvelous complexity.

  An even more unusual vowel type is found in

  , a language spoken in Botswana by about 700 people. These vowels, called among other terms “rough,” “strident,” or “epiglottalized,” are characterized by irregular and quite noisy vibrations of the epiglottis. In fact, according to Anthony Traill, the linguist who first described these vowels in detail, for part of the vowel the vocal cords are not vibrating at all. Auditorally, Traill notes, the impression may be like that of certain belches.

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  But are these languages as outré as they are sometimes made to sound? Certainly from the standpoint of most contemporary cultures, clicks are among the more exotic speech sounds, but it is interesting to look at them from both points of view. On the “exotic” side of the question, clicks are undoubtedly rare. As I noted at the beginning of this article, clicks are found as regular speech sounds only in a narrow band stretching from South Africa to Tanzania, though in the past they may well have had a wider distribution. Clicks are also unusual in the extent to which they dominate the sound systems of those languages that make use of them. By a rough estimate, 70% of vocabulary items in

  begin with clicks.

  Nevertheless, clicks are actually well behaved sounds. They can all be described in terms of the same parameters that are used for other consonants and they occur in regular series that parallel the series found in non-click sounds as shown in Table 2. Clicks also undergo regular sound changes just like other consonants. For example, Kxoe, a Central Khoesan language spoken in Botswana, has undergone a process known as Click Loss in which all examples of the alveolar click have been replaced by the click accompaniment. Put another way, the influx or click proper has been lost, leaving the click accompaniment. As a result, Khoekhoegowap !gari “hard,” !gom “heavy,” !ao “fear,” !noas “porcupine,” correspond to Kxoe kyeri, kom, 'ao, ngwe, whereas

  "heart” and

  "quarrel,” beginning with a palatal click which is not subject to the change, correspond to Kxoe

  and

  . The Khoesan languages, spoken by small, migratory populations, were never easy to study, and unfortunately local governments generally regarded them as not worthy of it. Much of the research on which this article is based has been done in the last fifty years as techniques for studying languages in the field improved and the Khoesan-speaking peoples have become more settled. Given the rate at which minority languages are vanishing, it is unlikely they will all survive beyond the next century, though there are hopeful signs like the literacy programs supported by the Ju/'hoan and Kxoe.

  The click languages are of great importance to theoretical linguistics because they help to define the boundaries of what is possible in a phonological system. One of the functions of science is accounting for the facts; so if linguistics is to be regarded as a science, then linguists must be able to explain why languages have the properties they do—for example, why some sounds are basic to all languages and others are peripheral. But the explanatory power of a scientific model depends crucially on the range of data available. And if all the click languages were to vanish, what linguist a few thousand years from now would be likely to imagine any language ever existed like Ju/'hoan Kokxui, “the language of the Real People"?

  * * * *

  Click Lore

  Click languages may also use clicks as interjections. When disgusted, the Sandawe say, “Ah, //."

  Speakers may render the same word in subtly different ways, a quality we call “accent” when speakers of different dialects or regional variants produce the same utterance. Clicks may also be pronounced with an “accent.” For example, Sandawe speakers sometimes replace the alveolar click ! with a tongueslap: the tongue tip is placed on the hard gums and then the blade of the tongue slapped down hard on the floor of the mouth.

  The Southern Khoesan language

  has words meaning “make a—click.” For example, /'aa/'aa “make a dental click";

  "make a palatal click";

  "make a lateral click."

  The alveolar click was referred to as a retroflex click in some early studies and its symbol, the exclamation point, is derived from a dental click slash / with the dot under it that linguists use for retroflex sounds.

  * * * *

  References:

  Barnard, Alan (1992) Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa. Cambridge University Press.

  Dickens, Patrick (1994) English-Ju/'hoan Ju/'hoan-English Dictionary. Rudiger Koppe Verlag.

  Dixon, R. M. W. (1980) The Languages of Australia. Cambridge University Press.

  Heine, Bernd & Nurse, Derek, editors (2000) African Languages an Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

  Ladefoged, Peter & Maddieson, Ian (1996) The Sounds of the World's Languages. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Oxford.

  Miller-Ockhuizen, Amanda and Sands, Bonny E.(2000)."Contrastive Lateral Clicks and Variation in Click Types.” In Proceedings of ICSLP 2000, Vol. II. Beijing, China, 499-500.

  Miller, Brugman, Sands, Namaseb, Exter, Collins, Differences in Articulation and Pulmonic Place of Articulation among N/uu Lingual Stops, unpublished, see the citation at Wikipedia, Clicks, which has a link to the article.

  Schapera, I. (1965, fourth reprinting) The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa. Lowe and Brydone, Ltd.

  Traill, Anthony (1985) Phonetic and Phonological Studies of !Xo'o Bushman. Helmut Buske Verlag.

  Acknowledgments:

  Thanks to Bonny Sands for reading and commenting on the manuscript.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Henry Honken

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: NO TRAVELLER RETURNS by Dave Creek

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  Illustration by John Allemand

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  Beings can rationalize the darndest things.

  * * * *

  All of Mike Christopher's suspicions were confirmed as the Sobrenian starcraft he was piloting, the Atir, exited stardrive with a lurch that nearly sent him sprawling from his seat. He turned to the craft's owner, Votana, and snapped, “You shouldn't have skipped that stop at the Laradarmel System. This ship is too short of fuel and in too bad a shape to go any farther."

  Votana stood just behind Mike. The Sobrenian's broad, rough-skinned hands wrapped his robes tighter around his torso, which was three times thicker than a human's. Those robes were of a plain blue material, without threads of a dif
ferent color running through them, indicating that Votana was low in the Sobrenian social hierarchy. His eyes swung independently in their sockets, one examining the Atir's controls, the other looking down his blunt snout at Mike. Votana spoke, and Mike's implanted datalink supplied the translation: “It doesn't matter. We're here."

  Now it was Mike who glanced at the sensors. There—about a hundred thousand K distant—some kind of space station. “What is it?"

  "I've arranged for passage for both of us aboard a Kanandran freighter. I knew the Atir would never be able to take us farther than this system. We'll get you back to your starcraft. What is it called?"

  "The Asaph Hall," Mike said. He got up from the pilot's seat to stand over Votana. The top of the Sobrenian's head only came up to his shoulder. “Listen, I made a big mistake when I hitched a ride with you from the conference on Goldsmith's Planet. You've been in too much of a hurry and cut too many corners. And I really knew something was up when you insisted I help you pilot."

  Both of Votana's eyes looked upward at Mike. “That's true. Sobrenians don't usually place much trust in humans."

  "So give. Who's chasing you? And what station is that?"

  "As for who is chasing us, that's a personal matter. Where we're headed—it's called the Station of the Lost."

  Mike felt every muscle in his body tense up. “Are you insane? Every misfit and outlaw in this sector ends up there. No government, no laws—just anarchy."

  "Except at its so-called southern tip, where there's a port. Some trade, mostly illicit, goes on there. But if there's no government, who's to say something is illicit?"

  The Atir shuddered again. Mike returned to his seat and did a quick systems check. “We're in worse shape than I thought. The in-system drive is seizing up. We'll be adrift in just a few moments."