Click Consonant - Transcription

Transcription

The five click releases with dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are labial ʘ, dental ǀ, palato-alveolar or "palatal" ǂ, (post)alveolar or "retroflex" ǃ, and alveolar lateral ǁ. In most languages, the retroflex and palatal releases are "abrupt"; that is, they are sharp popping sounds with little frication (turbulent airflow). The labial, dental, and lateral releases, on the other hand, are typically "noisy": they are longer, lip- or tooth-sucking sounds with turbulent airflow, and are sometimes called affricates. (This applies to the forward articulation; both may also have either an affricate or non-affricate rear articulation as well.) The apical releases, ǃ and ǁ, are sometimes called "grave", because their pitch is dominated by low frequencies; while the laminal releases, ǀ and ǂ, are sometimes called "acute", because they are dominated by high frequencies. (At least in the Nǁng language and Juǀʼhoan, this is associated with a difference in the placement of the rear articulation: "grave" clicks are uvular, whereas "acute" clicks are pharyngeal.) Thus the alveolar click /ǃ/ sounds something like a cork pulled from a bottle (a low-pitch pop), at least in Xhosa; while the dental click /ǀ/ is like English tsk! tsk!, a high-pitched sucking on the incisors. The lateral clicks are pronounced by sucking on the molars of one or both sides. The labial click /ʘ/ is different from what many people associate with a kiss: the lips are pressed more-or-less flat together, as they are for a or an, not rounded as they are for a .

The most populous languages with clicks, Zulu and Xhosa, use the letters c, q, x, by themselves and in digraphs, to write click consonants. Most Khoisan languages, on the other hand (with the notable exceptions of Naro and Sandawe), use a more iconic system based on the pipe ⟨|⟩. (The exclamation point for the "retroflex" click was originally a pipe with a subscript dot, along the lines of ṭ, ḍ, ṇ used to transcribe the retroflex consonants of India.) There are also two main conventions for the second letter of the digraph as well: voicing may be written with g and uvular affrication with x, or voicing with d and affrication with g (a convention of Afrikaans). In two orthographies of Juǀ’hoan, for example, /ǃ̬/ is written g! or dq, and /ǃ͡χ/ !x or qg. In languages without /ǃ͡χ/, such as Zulu, /ǃ̬/ may be written gq.

1. ^ ⟨ↆ⟩ was proposed by Clement Doke, and ʄ by Beach, but did not catch on, and are not supported by Unicode. (Doke resembles a down arrow and is here substituted by the old Roman numeral for 50; Beach is a double-barred esh.) Three of these, ʇ, ʗ, and ʖ, were adopted into the IPA, though eventually abandoned. Doke and Beach used additional or modified letters for voiced and nasal clicks, but they did not catch on.
2. ^ The labial and palatal clicks do not occur in written Bantu languages. However, the palatal clicks have been romanized in Naron, Juǀʼhõasi, and !Xung, where they have been written tc, ç, and qc, respectively. In the 19th century, they were sometimes written v, which might be source of the Doke letter ↆ.

There are a few less-well-attested articulations. A reported sub-apical retroflex release ⟨‼⟩ in Grootfontein ǃKung turns out to be alveolar with lateral release, ⟨ǃ⟩; Ekoka !Xung has a fricated alveolar click with an s-like release, provisionally transcribed ⟨ǃ͡s⟩; and Hadza and Sandawe have a "slapped" alveolar click, provisionally transcribed ⟨ǃ¡⟩ (in turn, the lateral clicks in Hadza and Sandawe are more abrupt and less noisy than in southern Africa). However, the Khoisan languages are poorly attested, and it is quite possible that, as they become better described, more click releases will be found.

Formerly when a click consonant was transcribed, two symbols were used, one for each articulation, and connected with a tie bar. This is because a click such as was analyzed as a nasal velar rear articulation pronounced simultaneously with the forward ingressive release . The symbols may be written in either order, depending on the analysis: ⟨ŋ͡ǂ⟩ or ⟨ǂ͡ŋ⟩. However, a tie bar was not often used in practice, and when the manner is tenuis (a simple ), it was often omitted as well. That is, ⟨ǂ⟩ = ⟨kǂ⟩ = ⟨ǂk⟩ = ⟨k͡ǂ⟩ = ⟨ǂ͡k⟩. Regardless, elements which do not overlap with the release are always written according to their temporal order: Prenasalization is always written first (⟨ŋɡ͡ǂ⟩ = ⟨ŋǂ͡ɡ⟩ = ⟨ŋǂ̬⟩), and the non-lingual part of a contour is always written second (⟨k͡ǂʼqʼ⟩ = ⟨ǂ͡kʼqʼ⟩ = ⟨ǂ͡qʼ⟩).

However, it has become standard to analyze clicks as simplex segments, as research has shown that the front and rear articulations are not independent, and to use click symbols to cover the rear articulation as well, with diacritics rather than digraphs for the accompaniments. At first this tended to be ⟨ǂ, ᶢǂ, ᵑǂ⟩ for ⟨k͡ǂ, ɡ͡ǂ, ŋ͡ǂ⟩, based on the belief that the rear articulation was velar; but as it has become clear that the rear articulation of both "velar" and "uvular" clicks is actually uvular or even pharyngeal, voicing and nasalization diacritics more in keeping with the IPA have started to appear: ⟨ǂ, ǂ̬, ǂ̃, ŋǂ̬⟩ for ⟨ǂ, ᶢǂ, ᵑǂ, ŋᶢǂ⟩.

In practical orthography, the voicing or nasalization is sometimes given the anterior place of articulation: dc for ᶢǀ and mʘ for ᵑʘ, for example.

Kirshenbaum transcription uses a very different different convention: clicks are denoted by "!" (always "!") added to the letter for the stop homorganic to the release, but with the manner of the accompaniment. For example, /t!/ is a voiceless dental click, and /m!/ is a nasal bilabial click. This convention is used in the literature on Damin, where the clicks are transcribed as m!, nh!, n!, rn!.