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Re: THEORY: clicks

From:Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 8, 2002, 9:28
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.
-- Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?" You ask, "What is the most important thing?" Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata." I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."