Re: THEORY: clicks

On Mon, 7 Oct 2002 20:57:44 +0100, And Rosta <a.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.
Ah, clicks - one of my favorite things!

>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).
Tony Traill & Rainer Vossen (iirc) wrote an article on click loss
a couple of years ago (ca 1997/1998, I think) and discussed this
phenomena in the context of several Khoisan languages. As I recall,
clicks decomposed to
     1) other clicks (usually with a reduction in number of distinct
click articulations, eg. alveopalatal clicks merge with dental clicks);
     2) to dorsals (velars or palatals) - either due to loss of the a
nterior closure, leaving behind the velar articulation, or due to
acoustic reinterpretation of an alveopalatal click as a palatal stop;
     3) to velar lateral affricates (I think they start out ejective,
but don't necessarily remain as such).

I also read an article that proposed a connection between labial clicks
and labial-velar double stops - I have read that some West African lgs
that possess the double stops do produce them with a certain amount of
velaric ingressive initiation, but can't recall which languages are
alleged to do this.

Setting aside Damin, which is so full of unusual sounds that it ought
to win some sort of prize (nasal velaric ingressives /m!, n!, nh!/;
glottalic egressive /k'/; velaric _egressive_, ie. a reverse click /p'/;
pulmonic _ingressive_ /l*/; plus standard pulmonic egressives, including
a (rearticulated?) labial trill /prbr/ and a voiceless velar nasal /ng*/),
I haven't found any documentation of phonemic use of clicks outside of
Africa, although a recent issue of the IPA notes a sort of language game
played by some Chinese speakers (one was Mandarin, one wasn't) which
inserts or substitutes a nasalized alveolar click for another segment
(in the non-Mandarin language it stands in for an initial velar nasal)
in a sort of nursery rhyme.

(So the Chinese, at least, seem to agree with And that nasalized clicks
are easier to produce!)

>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.
One explanation put forth about the borrowing of clicks is that they
resulted due to a language taboo involving uttering sounds in the
name of someone who'd recently died - so substitutes would be needed
and since the Bantu and Khoisan speakers were intermarrying, there
was a readily available substitute.

>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.
It does seem to me that it is remarkable that there are no traces of
click-using languages elsewhere, but it is entirely within the realms
of possibility that there were other small populations that used clicks
in their languages, that either died out completely, lost the clicks
at some very distant point in time, or acquired a non-click language
through contact.

Bfowol