Re: CHAT: Rare Phonetics

Hi!

Danny Wier <dawier@...> writes:
> Only Khoisan language I've ever heard was from the movie _The Gods Must Be
> Crazy_ (I think it was Nama).  !Xou or !Xu -- I really thing they're different
> spellings of the same thing -- doesn't just have clicks.  It has aspirated
> clicks, affricate clicks, prenasal clicks, sibilantized clicks, glottalized
> clicks, voiced clicks, labialized clicks...
Wow!!  I knew !Xu~ was weird but now I'd really love to listen to that!

But for the start, I don't know whether I posted this link already, so
please excuse a potential redundancy, here is an example of the
Khoisan language Ju|'hoansi:

http://ling.ohio-state.edu/~amiller/juspeech.html

I liked it.  Especially because it's given with circumscription and
English.

And I found very strange similarities with Spanish vocabulary:

  e   = and
  mi  = I, my, me
  ba  = father

Furthermore, it seems to be isolating and SVO, so

  E mi ba o Kx'ao. = And my father is Kx'ao.

Exactly the same word order.  (Of course, this does not hold for all
sentences).

I concluded that ' (apostophe) denotes a glottal closure, so Kx' is an
ejective and |' is an unvoiced (non-nasalized) click.

And ! (excl.mark) is really a *very* great click!  E.g. Tsum!kui is a
city's name.

**Henrik

PS: And the problem with searching the Web for !Xu~ is that the search
engines are simply to brain-dead to understand what I really mean that
very sequence of characters. :-(

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