Re: THEORY: clicks

John Cowan:
> Christophe Grandsire scripsit:
> > (although clicks seem a strange thing to borrow ;))) ).
>
> On the contrary.  What possible phonological process could generate clicks
> from any other sound?  We more or less understand how implosives and
> ejectives form, but clicks???  The surprising thing is not that some
> languages borrow clicks, but that there are any click languages at all.
> As it is, if the Khoi-San had died out, we would be proclaiming that clicks
> in ordinary morphemes (that is, excluding kissy noises and horse-talk)
> were a violation of Universal Grammar.
It's also comparatively hard to see how clicks would fall out of a
language; they don't readily seem to decompose into anything else.
(You will be able to tell me which chemical elements are analogously
rare and stable.) So I find it surprising not that clicks are rare,
but that they are apparently all from a single source (i.e. some Khoi-
San language with areal diffusion).

Like Christophe, I do find it surprising that clicks get borrowed.
Wouldn't you be surprised if Afrikaans started borrowing clicks?
The surprisingness is the alienness. The mechanism of borrowing
itself is not surprising: borrow foreign click-ful words, bilinguals
preserve original pronunciation, clicks get nativized and then
extended to indigenous vocab.

Some other surprising things about clicks:
* The incredible range of secondary articulations.
* The comparative rarity of bilabial clicks, compared to their frequency
in paralanguage.
* The way that in click languages the oral/nasal contrast in clicks
reflects the markedness pattern of that contrast with stops in general,
whereas for known articulatory reasons speakers of nonclick languages
find nasalized clicks much easier to integrate into the speech
stream. (As you know, in Livagian the clicks form a +nasal -pulmonic
stop series.)

--And.

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