Ekoka ǃKung (Ekoka ǃXuun, Ekoka-ǃXû, ǃKung-Ekoka) or Western ǃXuun (North-Central Ju) is a variety of the
ǃKung dialect cluster, spoken originally in the area of the central
Namibian–
Angolan border, west of the
Okavango River, but since the
Angolan Civil War also in
South Africa.
Dialects
Heine & Honken (2010) place Ekoka in the ''Northern–Western'' branch of ǃXuun (ǃKung), where Ekoka is equivalent to the Western branch. They distinguish three varieties:
*Western ǃXuun (Kung-Ekoka)
**Tsintsabis (natively ''ǃxūún''; spoken in Tsintsabis, Tsumeb district, N Namibia)
**ǀAkhwe (natively ''ǃxūún, ǀʼākhòè ǃxòān'' "Kwanyama ǃXuun"; spoken in Eenhana, N Namibia)
**
o name
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), plu ...
(natively ''ǃxūún, ǃʼālè ǃxòān'' "Valley ǃXuun"; spoken in Eenhana district, N Namibia)
Sands et al. place it in its own branch, which they call ''North-Central Ju'':
*North-Central Ju (Namibia, between the Ovambo River and the Angolan border, around the tributaries of the Okavango River east of Rundu to the
Etosha Pan
The Etosha Pan is a large endorheic salt pan, forming part of the Cuvelai-Etosha Basin in the north of Namibia. It is a hollow in the ground in which water may collect or in which a deposit of salt remains after water has evaporated. The 120-kilo ...
)
**Tsintsabis
**ǀʼAkhwe
**Okongo
**Ovambo
**Mpunguvlei
Tsintsabis might actually be
Central ǃKung
Central ǃKung (Central ǃXun), or Central Ju, is a language of the ǃKung dialect cluster, spoken in a small area of northern Namibia: Neitsas, in Grootfontein district, and Gaub, in Tsumeb district. It is frequently reported as Grootfontein ...
.
Phonology
Consonants
Ekoka ǃKung has an indistinguishable sound system to
Juǀʼhoansi. However, the series of
palatal clicks, ''etc'', have a fricated lateral release (see
fricated palatal clicks). These are provisionally transcribed or , etc., and behave similarly to palatal (rather than alveolar) clicks in terms of not following the
back-vowel constraint.
In addition to the twelve 'accompaniments' of clicks in Juǀʼhoansi, Ekoka has preglottalized nasal clicks, such as . These are not common cross-linguistically, but are also found in
Taa
Trans Australia Airlines (TAA), renamed Australian Airlines in 1986, was one of the two major Australian domestic airlines between its inception in 1946 and its merger with Qantas in September 1992. As a result of the "COBRA" (or Common Brand ...
and
ǂHoan.
König & Heine (2001) report the following inventory, with the clicks as analyzed by Miller (2011). One of the click series, called 'fortis' in König & Heine, is only attested at two places of articulation; it is not clear which this corresponds to in the table below. There are also prenasalized in Bantu loans.
: is shown as post-alveolar; cf. the epiglottalized found in
Juǀ'hoan, though this could be an alignment error. Similarly, is shown as palatal, along with and in contrast to post-alveolar .
More recently, Heine & König find that Ekoka ǃKung also has a series of preglottalized nasal consonants, including
preglottalized nasal clicks:
[Gerlach, Linda (2015) "Phonetic and phonological description of the Nǃaqriaxe variety of ǂʼAmkoe and the impact of language contact". PhD dissertation, Humboldt University, Berlin]
:
Vowels
Ekoka has a full set of modal and murmured (breathy) vowels, as well as
pharyngealized back vowels, and a reduced set of modal, murmured, and pharyngealized
nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced wit ...
s:
:''i e a o u – ih eh ah oh uh – aq oq uq – in an un – ahn ohn – aqn oqn uqn''
Grammar
Linguistically, ǃKung is generally termed
isolating, meaning that words' meanings are changed by the addition of other, separate words, rather than by the addition of affixes or the changing of word structure. A few suffixes exist - for example, distributive plurals are formed with the noun suffix -si or -mhi, but in the main meaning is given only by series of words rather than by grouping of affixes.
ǃKung distinguishes no formal plural, and the suffixes -si and -mhi are optional in usage. The language's
word order is adverb–subject–verb–object, and in this it is similar to English: "the snake bites the man" is represented by (ǂʼaama - snake, nǃei - to bite, zhu - man). ǃKung-ekoka uses word and sentence tone contours, and has a very finely differentiated vocabulary for the animals, plants and conditions native to the
Kalahari Desert, where the language is spoken. For example, the plant genus ''
Grewia
''Grewia'' is a large flowering plant genus in the mallow family Malvaceae, in the expanded sense as proposed by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group. Formerly, Grewia was placed in either the family Tiliaceae or the Sparrmanniaceae. However, these ...
'' is referred to by five different words, representing five different species in this genus.
References
Sources
*Bernd Heine & Christa König, 2010. ''The ǃXun language: A dialect grammar.'' Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
*König, Christa and Bernd Heine. 2008. A concise dictionary of northwestern !Xun. (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung, 21.) Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
* Amanda Miller et al., 2011, "The Phonetics of the Modernday reflexes of the Proto‐palatal click in Juu languages" (Ekoka and Mangetti Dune)
*Miller, Sands, et al., 2010. "Retroflex Clicks in Two Dialects of ǃXung" (Grootfontein and Ekoka)
External links
Ekoka basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{Languages of Botswana
Kx'a languages