Alveolar click

Alveolar click consonants and their transcription

In official IPA transcription, the click letter is combined with a via a tie bar, though is frequently omitted. Many authors instead use a superscript without the tie bar, again often neglecting the . Either letter, whether baseline or superscript, is usually placed before the click letter, but may come after when the release of the velar or uvular occlusion is audible. A third convention is the click letter with diacritics for voicelessness, voicing and nasalization; it does not distinguish velar from uvular alveolar clicks. Common alveolar clicks in these three transcriptions are:

The last can be heard in the sound sample at right; non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them. The nasal click may also be heard at the right.

In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for alveolar clicks may be based on either the vertical bar symbol of the IPA, , or on the Latin of Bantu convention. Khoekhoe and most Bushman languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.

Features

Features of postalveolar clicks:

• The forward place of articulation is alveolar or postalveolar, depending on the language, and apical, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge or the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge. (Damin contrasted these two articulations as separate phonemes.) The release is a sharp, plosive sound in southern Africa, but in Sandawe it may be percussive, with the underside of the tip of the tongue striking the floor of the mouth after the release of the click (see below), and in Hadza the release is often quite weak.

Occurrence

English does not have an alveolar click (or any other click consonant) as a phoneme, but a plain alveolar click does occur in mimesis, as a sound children use to imitate a horse trotting.

{{anchor|Percussive alveolar clicks}}Percussive release

(tenuis velar) |ipa-number=|decimal= (nasal velar) |ipa-number=|decimal=

In Sandawe, alveolar clicks commonly have a ballistic release, with the underside of the tip of the tongue subsequently striking the floor of the mouth. This allophone has been called "slapped" or "flapped" (not to be confused with flap consonants, such as the reduced alveolar clicks of Hadza). Sometimes the percussive slap is louder than the release, resulting in a sound that has been characterized as a "cluck". The symbol for the sublingual percussive component is in the extensions to the IPA; a slapped click is therefore transcribed or (or ). The percussive allophones of the five Sandawe alveolar clicks are (or etc.).

Clement Doke also noted a palatal click with slapped release, .

Nasal clicks that fit this description are used in nursery rhymes by speakers of Gan Chinese and of Mandarin, with varying degrees of competence. See Chinese click sounds for details.

{{anchor|"Fricated" alveolar click}}"Fricated" alveolar clicks

A series of clicks in Ekoka !Kung have been variously described as retroflex or fricated palatal clicks.

References

References

1. Pullum & Ladusaw, ''[[Phonetic Symbol Guide]],'' p. 34
2. Tucker ''et al.'' (1977), ''The East-African Click Languages: A Phonetic Comparison''
3. Wright, Richard, Ian Maddieson, Peter Ladefoged, Bonny Sands (1995). "A phonetic study of Sandawe clicks", ''UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'', No. 91: Fieldwork Studies in Targeted Languages III.
4. Clement Doke (1925) An outline of the phonetics of the language of the ʗhũ̬꞉ Bushman of the North-West Kalahari. ''Bantu Studies'' 2: 129–166.
5. Geoffrey Nathan, 'Clicks in a Chinese Nursery Rhyme', JIPA (2001) 31/2.