Re: THEORY: clicks

En réponse à Eamon Graham <robertg@...>:

> Hi all,
>
> I was looking over my IPA chart and I was wondering two things:
>
> 1. Has anyone ever used clicks in their conlangs?
>
One name: Rob Nierse! His Gbwíá has tones, coarticulated stops and clicks! ;))

I never really used clicks myself, because I just cannot differentiate them.
However, I know that one dialect of Itakian replaces all its stops (except
glottal) with corresponding clicks, and all its fricatives (except in non-
initial positions, and the glottal fricative is not part of that either) with
the corresponding stops. The fact that this dialect is spoken by an Itakian
tribe living among people speaking Khoisan languages like Xhosa may explain
this strange occurence (only this dialect has such a different phonetic
distribution of sounds compared to other dialects of Itakian).

> 2. I only know of a few African languages that have clicks; are
> there others outside of Africa?
>
Good question. It's true that it seems that clicks are restricted to the
Khoisan language family, although at least one language unrelated to them
(Dahalo, a Cushitic language) has clicks too. But it could have got them from
contact with Khoisan languages (although clicks seem a strange thing to
borrow ;))) ). A search to the Ethnologue gave nothing. But it mentions the
presence of clicks only for Xhosa and Dahalo, although plenty of languages
related to Xhosa have clicks too. Googling for that, I found a page I had
forgotten about: Damin (http://www.invisiblelighthouse.com/langlab/damin.html)
is a language spoken in Australia, and as far as I can see the only non-african
language containing clicks existing. But Damin is the ceremonial language of
the Lardil men and has been conciously designed to be different from their
everyday speech. In short, it's a conlang! ;)))

Note: while looking for something about clicks, I found this page:
http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/ which is full of small essays about all
sorts of aspects of language and languages. It seems quite interesting to
read...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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