Re: Click consonants

> Cán be phonemic. I don't think we have enough examples of click languages
> to generalize that the distinction between k! and g! múst be phonemic in
> any language with clicks. There certainly are examples of languages that
> don't distinguish between voiced and voiceless stops, but those languages
> don't have clicks. Just because an example of a particular language feature
> isn't known doesn't mean that it's humanly impossible (a general problem
> with so-called "language universals"). And even though Qiira Triicha isn't
> intended as a human language, I don't think that it'd be unnatural for a
> human language to lack a distinction between voiced and voiceless click
> accompaniments if it also fails to distinguish between voiced and voiceless
> stops in general.
No, if your language distinguishes voicing, the clicks should distinguish voicing. If
there is aspiration, clicks vary there, too. The click distinctions usually parallel
the distinctions in the rest of the language.

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