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Various letters have been used to write the
click consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...
s of southern Africa. The precursors of the current
IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...
letters, , were created by
Karl Richard Lepsius Karl Richard Lepsius ( la, Carolus Richardius Lepsius) (23 December 181010 July 1884) was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist, linguist and modern archaeologist. He is widely known for his magnum opus ''Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien'' ...
and used by
Wilhelm Bleek Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (8 March 1827 – 17 August 1875) was a German linguist. His work included ''A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages'' and his great project jointly executed with Lucy Lloyd: The Bleek and Lloyd Archive o ...
and
Lucy Lloyd Lucy Catherine Lloyd (7 November 1834 – 31 August 1914) was the creator, along with Wilhelm Bleek, of the 19th-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts. Early life Lucy Catherine Lloyd was born in Norbury in England on 7 November 1834. He ...
, who added . Also influential were Daniel Jones, who created the letters that were promoted by the IPA from 1921 to 1989, and used
Clement Doke Clement Martyn Doke (16 May 1893 in Bristol, United Kingdom – 24 February 1980 in East London, South Africa) was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are q ...
and
Douglas Beach Douglas may refer to: People * Douglas (given name) * Douglas (surname) Animals *Douglas (parrot), macaw that starred as the parrot ''Rosalinda'' in Pippi Longstocking *Douglas the camel, a camel in the Confederate Army in the American Civil W ...
. Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or on the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
. They may change over time or between countries. Latin letters, such as ''c x q ç'', have
case Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to c ...
forms; the pipe letters, ''ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ'', do not.


Multiple systems

By the early 19th century, the otherwise unneeded letters ''c x q'' were used as the basis for writing clicks in Zulu by British and German missions. However, for general linguistics this was confusing, as each of these letters had other uses. There were various ''ad hoc'' attempts to create letters—often iconic symbols—for click consonants, with the most successful being those of the
Standard Alphabet by Lepsius The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his ''Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien'' and extended it to write African languages, publi ...
, which were based on a single symbol (pipe, double pipe, pipe-acute, pipe-sub-dot) and from which the modern
Khoekhoe Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...
letters descend. During the First World War, Daniel Jones created the equivalent letters in response to a 1914 request to fill this gap in the IPA, and these were published in 1921 (see
history of the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for p ...
). By 1911, if not earlier,
Lucy Lloyd Lucy Catherine Lloyd (7 November 1834 – 31 August 1914) was the creator, along with Wilhelm Bleek, of the 19th-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts. Early life Lucy Catherine Lloyd was born in Norbury in England on 7 November 1834. He ...
created the letter for
bilabial click The bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants that sound like a smack of the lips. They are found as phonemes only in the small Tuu language family (currently two languages, one moribund), in the ǂ’Amkoe language of Botswana (also mo ...
s.
Clement Doke Clement Martyn Doke (16 May 1893 in Bristol, United Kingdom – 24 February 1980 in East London, South Africa) was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are q ...
expanded on Jones' letters in 1923. Based on an empirically informed conception of the nature of click consonants, he analyzed voiced and nasal clicks as separate consonants, much as voiced plosives and nasals are considered separate consonants from voiceless plosives among the pulmonic consonants, and so added letters for voiced and nasal clicks. (Jones' palatal click letter was not used, however. Jones had called it "velar", and Doke called palatal clicks "alveolar".) Doke was the first to report
retroflex click The retroflex clicks are a family of click consonants known only from the Central !Kung dialects of Namibia. They are sub-apical retroflex and should not be confused with the more widespread postalveolar clicks, which are sometimes mistakenly ...
s.
Douglas Beach Douglas may refer to: People * Douglas (given name) * Douglas (surname) Animals *Douglas (parrot), macaw that starred as the parrot ''Rosalinda'' in Pippi Longstocking *Douglas the camel, a camel in the Confederate Army in the American Civil W ...
would publish a somewhat similar system in his phonetic description of
Khoekhoe Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...
. Because Khoekhoe had no voiced clicks, he only created new letters for the four nasal clicks. Again, he didn't use Jones' "velar" click letter, but created one of his own, () based on the Lepsius letter but graphically modified to better fit the design of the IPA. Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a
pipe Pipe(s), PIPE(S) or piping may refer to: Objects * Pipe (fluid conveyance), a hollow cylinder following certain dimension rules ** Piping, the use of pipes in industry * Smoking pipe ** Tobacco pipe * Half-pipe and quarter pipe, semi-circula ...
for Lepsius, modifications of Latin letters for Jones), there was a conceptual difference between them and Doke or Beach: Lepsius used one letter as the base for all click consonants of the same
place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...
(called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for the
manner of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
(called the 'efflux'), treating them as two distinct sounds (the click proper and its accompaniment), whereas Doke used a separate letter for each tenuis,
voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...
, and
nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery ** ...
click, treating each as a distinct consonant, following the example of the Latin alphabet, where the voiced and nasal
occlusive In phonetics, an occlusive, sometimes known as a stop, is a consonant sound produced by occluding (i.e. blocking) airflow in the vocal tract, but not necessarily in the nasal tract. The duration of the block is the ''occlusion'' of the consonan ...
s also treated as distinct consonants (''p b m, t d n, c j ñ, k g ŋ''). Doke's nasal-click letters were based on the letter , continuing the pattern of the pulmonic nasal consonants . For example, the letter for the dental nasal click is ; the alveolar is similar but with the curl on the left leg, the lateral has a curl on both legs, and the retroflex and palatal are ''ɲ, ŋ'' with a curl on their free leg: . The voiced-click letters are more individuated, a couple were simply inverted versions of the tenuis-click letters. The tenuis–voiced pairs were dental (the letter had not yet been added to the IPA for the
voiced velar fricative The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in various spoken languages. It is not found in Modern English but existed in Old English. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , ...
), alveolar , retroflex , palatal 𝗅 and lateral . A proposal to add Doke's letters to
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
was not approved. Beach wrote on
Khoekhoe Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...
and so had no need for letters for the voiced clicks; he created letters for nasal clicks by adding a curl to the bottom of the tenuis-click letters: (=) for nasal (⨎), (stretched ) for nasal , (turned but with the curl on the bottom) for nasal , and (like a topless ) for nasal : . Doke and Beach both wrote aspirated clicks with an ''h'', , and the glottalized nasal clicks as an oral click with a glottal stop, . Beach also wrote the affricate contour clicks with an ''x'', .


Transcribing voicing, nasalization and the velar–uvular distinction

Doke had run "admirable" experiments establishing the nature of click consonants as unitary sounds. Nonetheless, Bleek in his highly influential work on Bushman languages rejected Doke's orthography on theoretical grounds, arguing that each of Doke's letters stood for two sounds, "a combination of the implosive sound with the sound made by the expulsion of the breath" (that is, influx plus efflux), and that it was impossible to write the clicks themselves in Doke's orthography, as "we cannot call he implosive soundseither unvoiced, voiced, or nasal." Bleek therefore used digraphs based on the Lepsius letters, as Lepsius himself had done for the same reason. However, linguists have since come down on the side of Doke and take the two places of articulation to be inherent in the nature of clicks, because both are required to create a click: the 'influx' cannot exist without the 'efflux', so a symbol for an influx has only theoretical meaning just as a symbol like for 'alveolar consonant' does not indicate any actual consonant. Regardless, today separate letters like Doke's are not provided by the IPA (or other systems), and linguists resort to diacritics that would not be used for non-click consonants. (For example, no-one transcribes a alveolar nasal stop as or analogous to the way one writes a
dental nasal click The dental nasal click is a click consonant found primarily among the languages of southern Africa. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notati ...
as or in current IPA or as or in pre-Kiel IPA.) Summarized below are the common means of representing voicing, nasalization and dorsal place of articulation, from Bleek's digraphs reflecting an analysis as
co-articulated consonant Co-articulated consonants or complex consonants are consonants produced with two simultaneous places of articulation. They may be divided into two classes: doubly articulated consonants with two primary places of articulation of the same manner ...
s, to those same letters written as superscripts to function as diacritics, reflecting an analysis as unitary consonants, to the more common IPA combining diacritics for voicing and nasalization. Because the last option cannot indicate the posterior place of articulation, it does not distinguish velar from uvular clicks. The letter Ʞ is used here as a wildcard for any click letter. A distinction may be made between for an inaudible rear articulation, for an audible one, and for a notably delayed release of the rear articulation.


Historical orthographies

Written languages with clicks generally use an alphabet either based on the Lepsius alphabet, with multigraphs based on the pipe letters for clicks, or on the Zulu alphabet, with multigraphs based on ''c q x'' for clicks. In the latter case, there have been several conventions for the palatal clicks. Some languages have had more than one orthography over the years. For example,
Khoekhoe Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...
has had at least the following, using palatal clicks as an example: Historical roman orthographies have been based on the following sets of letters: There are two principal conventions for writing the manners of articulation (the 'effluxes'), which are used with both the Lepsius and Zulu orthographies. One uses ''g'' for voicing and ''x'' for affricate clicks; the other uses ''d'' for voicing and ''g'' for affricate clicks. Both use ''n'' for nasal clicks, but these letters may come either before or after the base letter. For simplicity, these will be illustrated across various orthographies using the
lateral click The lateral clicks are a family of click consonants found only in African languages. The clicking sound used by equestrians to urge on their horses is a lateral click, although it is not a speech sound in that context. Lateral clicks are found t ...
s only.


References

{{Reflist Click consonants Click languages Latin-script letters Phonetic transcription symbols Phonetic alphabets