Re: THEORY: clicks

On Tuesday 08 October 2002 08:57 am, And Rosta wrote:
> 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?
I feel a conlang coming on ... first, I'll have to learn my Xhosa (Teach
Yourself) and find myself a copy of Zulu (Teach Yourself) and also find a
copy of Afrikaans (etc) and hopefully work out how in some future South
Africa Afrikaans became so heavily intertwined with Xhosa and Zulu, etc ...

Wesley Parish

> 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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