Click Genesis and Click Loss
Clicks are often portrayed as a primordial feature of human language, a romantic reflection of the primordial lifestyle imagined of the speakers of Khoisan languages. One genetic study concluded that clicks, which occur in the languages of the genetically divergent populations Hadza and !Kung, may be an ancient element of human language. However, this conclusion relies on several dubious assumptions (see Hadza language), and most linguists assume that clicks, being quite complex consonants, arose relatively late in human history. How they arose is not known, but it is generally assumed that they developed from sequences of non-click consonants, possibly doubly articulated or glottalic, as they are found allophonically for doubly articulated consonants in West Africa (Ladefoged 1968), and even where /tk/ sequences overlap at word boundaries in German (Fuchs 2007). Such developments have also been posited in historical reconstruction. For example, the Sandawe word for 'horn', /tɬana/, with a lateral affricate, may be a cognate with the root /ᵑǁaː/ found throughout the Khoe family, which has a lateral click. This and other words suggests that at least some Khoe clicks may have formed from consonant clusters when the first vowel of a word was lost; in this instance → → / .
On the other side of the equation, several non-endangered languages in vigorous use demonstrate click loss. For example, the East Kalahari languages have lost clicks from a large percentage of their vocabulary, presumably due to Bantu influence. As a rule, a click is replaced by a consonant with close to the manner of articulation of the click and the place of articulation of the forward release: alveolar click releases (the family) tend to mutate into a velar stop or affricate, such as, ; palatal clicks ( etc.) tend to mutate into a palatal stop such as, or a post-alveolar affricate, ; and dental clicks ( etc.) tend to mutate into an alveolar affricate .
Read more about this topic: Click Consonant
Famous quotes containing the words genesis and/or loss:
“Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)