A Nama man giving a literacy lesson in Khoekhoegowab that includes click letters 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 letters, ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩, were created by

Karl Richard Lepsius Karl Richard Lepsius (; 23 December 181010 July 1884) was a German people, Prussian Egyptology, Egyptologist, Linguistics, linguist and modern archaeology, modern archaeologist. He is widely known for his opus magnum ''Denkmäler aus Ägypten ...

and used by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who added . Also influential were Daniel Jones, who created the letters ⟨ʇ⟩ ⟨ʖ⟩ ⟨ʗ⟩ ⟨ʞ⟩ that were promoted by the IPA from 1921 to 1989, and were used by Clement Doke and Douglas Beach. Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or on the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

. They may change over time or between countries. Latin letters, such as ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ ⟨ç⟩, have

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

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 linguistic transcription this was confusing, as each of these letters had other uses. There were various ''ad hoc'' attempts to create dedicated letters—often iconic symbols—for click consonants, with the most successful being those of the

Standard Alphabet by Lepsius Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...

, which were based on a single symbol (pipe, double pipe, pipe-acute, pipe-sub-dot) and from which the modern

Khoekhoe Khoikhoi ( /ˈkɔɪkɔɪ/ ''KOY-koy'') (or Khoekhoe in Namibian orthography) are the traditionally nomadic pastoralist indigenous population of South Africa. They are often grouped with the hunter-gatherer San (literally "foragers") peop ...

letters ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩ descend. During the First World War, Daniel Jones created the equivalent letters ⟨ʇ⟩ ⟨ʖ⟩ ⟨ʗ⟩ ⟨ʞ⟩ 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 fo ...

). In 1875, if not earlier, Wilhelm Bleek used 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 down to its last speaker), in the ǂ’Amkoe language ...

s. It was also used 1911 by Lucy Lloyd. Clement Doke 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 A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...

s. Douglas Beach would publish a somewhat similar system in his phonetic description of

. 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. The

African reference alphabet The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organi ...

proposal has apparently never been used, while the Linguasphere and Lingvarium transcriptions are typewriter substitutions specific to those institutions. Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a pipe 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 an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...

(called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for the

manner of articulation 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 refe ...

, 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 letters for the palatal and retroflex clicks are ⟨ŋ⟩ ⟨ɲ⟩ with a curl on their free leg: ⟨ Doke palatal nasal click

⟩ ⟨

⟩. 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 most varieties of Modern English but existed in Old English. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents ...

), alveolar , retroflex ,In Doke's publications there is no ascender on the middle stroke (, ), as in some sans-serif ('grotesk') fonts like the Arial font. palatal (or ) and lateral . A proposal to add Doke's letters to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

was not approved. File:ʖhapopen ʇʔoas.png, The Nama name ''ǁhapopen ǀoas'' (''ʖhapopen ʇʔoas''), from Beach's phonology. File:Khoekhoe words ǂae ǂʔui.png, The Khoekhoe word ''ǂgaeǂui'' (''𝼋ae-𝼋ʔui''), illustrating Beach's distinctive form of the letter ''ǂ''. File:Khoekhoe ǁnau.png, The Khoekhoe word ''ǁnau'' (''𝼎au''), illustrating the curled tail Beach used to indicate

nasal click Nasal clicks are click consonants pronounced with nasal airflow. All click types ( alveolar , dental , lateral , palatal , retroflex , and labial ) have nasal variants, and these are attested in four or five phonations: voiced, voiceles ...

s. Beach wrote on

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: . 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'', . The only other scripts to have letters for clicks are Nk’o, which includes them for paralexical use, and the experimental

Ditema tsa Dinoko Ditema tsa Dinoko (), also known as isiBheqe soHlamvu (), and sometimes known as Xiyinhlanharhu xa Mipfawulo or Xifungho xa Manungu in Tsonga language, xiTsonga and Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo or Vhuga ha Madungo in Venda language, tshiVen� ...

script, which uses them lexically.

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, separate letters like Doke's and Beach's were never provided by the IPA, and today linguists continue to resort to digraphs or diacritics in a way that is not used for non-click consonants. (For example, no-one transcribes a alveolar nasal stop as either 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 for a nasal dental click with a velar rear articulation is or , commonly abbreviated to , ...

as or .) 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 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 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; for aspirated clicks these are , , . In the older literature, voicing is commonly marked by a wavy diacritic under the click letter, thus: .

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,

has had at least the following, using dental 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 fou ...

s only.

Gallery

The following systems are presented in the same order: bilabial ('ɋ'), dental ('c'), lateral ('x'), alveolar ('q'), palatal ('v') and retroflex ('‼'), with gaps for missing letters. The Zulu click letters of the Norwegian mission: Unicode 0x0020.svg Qoppa.svg, Double qoppa.svg, Dotted double qoppa.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Unicode 0x0020.svg Lepsius's click letters (lower case; upper case are taller): Unicode 0x0020.svg Lepsius dental click.svg, Lepsius lateral click.svg, Lepsius cerebral click.svg, Lepsius palatal click.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Sundevall's click letters (lower case): Unicode 0x0020.svg Sundevall dental click.svg, Sundevall lateral click.svg, Sundevall cerebral click.svg, Sundevall palatal click.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Sundevall's click letters (upper case): Unicode 0x0020.svg Unicode 0x03A8.svg, Sundevall lateral capital.svg, Sundevall cerebral capital.svg, Sundevall palatal capital.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Jones's IPA letters: Unicode 0x0020.svg IPA Unicode 0x0287.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0296.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0297.svg, IPA Unicode 0x029E.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Doke's letters for voiceless clicks: Unicode 0x0020.svg IPA Unicode 0x0287.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0296.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0297.svg, Doke palatal click.svg, Unicode 0x03C8.svg, Doke's letters for voiced clicks: Unicode 0x0020.svg IPA Unicode 0x0263.svg, Double gamma.svg, Calligraphic Q.svg, Doke palatal voiced click.svg, Turned psi.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Unicode 0x0020.svg Double loop.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Unicode 0x0020.svg Unicode 0x0020.svg Doke's letters for nasal clicks: Unicode 0x0020.svg Doke dental nasal click.svg, Doke lateral nasal click.svg, Doke alveolar nasal click.svg, Doke palatal nasal click.svg, Doke retroflex nasal click.svg, Beach's et al. letters for voiceless clicks: Unicode 0x024B.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0287.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0296.svg, IPA Unicode 0x0297.svg, U+1DF0B.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Beach's letters for nasal clicks: Unicode 0x0020.svg U+1DF0D.svg, U+1DF0E.svg, U+1DF0F.svg, U+1DF0C.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Post-Kiel IPA (baseline, e.g. 1989): IPA Unicode 0x0298.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C0 alt.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C1 alt.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C3.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C2 alt.svg, IPA Unicode 1xDF0A.svg, Post-Kiel IPA (with descenders, e.g. 2020): IPA Unicode 0x0298.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C0.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C1.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C3.svg, IPA Unicode 0x01C2.svg, IPA Unicode 1xDF0A.svg, Ditema syllabics letters: DtsD_Example_BilabialClick.svg, DtsD_Example_DentalClick.svg, DtsD_Example_LateralClick.svg, DtsD_Example_AlveolarClick.svg, DtsD_Example_PalatalClick.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg Nko phonetic letters: Nko bilabial click.svg, Nko dental click.svg, Nko lateral click.svg, Nko alveolar click.svg, Nko palatal click.svg, Unicode 0x0020.svg

References

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