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
Namibia
Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country on the west coast of Southern Africa. Its borders include the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south; in the no ...
n–
Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...
n border, west of the
Okavango River
The Okavango River (formerly spelt Okovango or Okovanggo), is a river in southwest Africa. It is known by this name in Botswana, and as Cubango in Angola, and Kavango in Namibia. It is the fourth-longest river system in southern Africa, runni ...
, but since the
Angolan Civil War
The Angolan Civil War () was a civil war in Angola, beginning in 1975 and continuing, with interludes, until 2002. The war began immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal in November 1975. It was a power struggle between two for ...
also in
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...
.
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(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 vast hollow in the ground in which water may collect or in which a deposit of salt remains after water has evaporated. The 1 ...
)
**Tsintsabis
**ǀʼAkhwe
**Okongo
**Ovambo
**Mpunguvlei
Tsintsabis might actually be
Central ǃKung.
Phonology
Consonants
Ekoka ǃKung has an indistinguishable sound system to
Juǀʼhoansi. However, the series of
palatal click
The palatal or palato-alveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found, as components of words, only in southern Africa. The tongue is nearly flat, and is pulled back rather than down as in the postalveolar clicks, making a sharpe ...
s have a fricated lateral release (see
fricated palatal clicks). These are provisionally transcribed or etc. and behave similarly to palatal clicks ( ''etc'') 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 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
Juǀʼhoan, 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
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
IPA symbols
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pharyngealization can be indicate ...
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 /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...
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
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...
is adverb–subject–verb–object, and in this it is similar to English: "the snake bites the man" is represented by (ǂǂʼaama - 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
The Kalahari Desert is a large semiarid climate, semiarid sandy savanna in Southern Africa covering including much of Botswana as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa.
It is not to be confused with the Angolan, Namibian, and South African ...
, where the language is spoken. For example, the plant genus ''
Grewia
''Grewia'' is a large flowering plant genus in the mallow family (biology), family Malvaceae, in the expanded sense as proposed by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group. Formerly, ''Grewia'' was placed in either the family Tiliaceae or the Sparrmanni ...
'' 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