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Various letters have been used to write theclick consonants of southern Africa. The precursors of the currentIPA letters, ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩, were created byKarl Richard Lepsius[1][2] and used byWilhelm Bleek[3] andLucy Lloyd, who added ⟨ʘ⟩.Also influential wereDaniel Jones, who created the letters ⟨ʇ⟩ ⟨ʖ⟩ ⟨ʗ⟩ ⟨ʞ⟩ that were promoted by the IPA from 1921 to 1989, and were used byClement Doke[4][5] andDouglas Beach.[6]
Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either theLepsius alphabet or on theLatin alphabet. They may change over time or between countries. Latin letters, such as ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ ⟨ç⟩, havecase forms; the pipe letters ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩ do not.[7]
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By the early 19th century, the otherwise unneeded letters ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ were used as the basis for writing clicks inZulu by British and German missions.[8] However, for general linguistic transcription this was confusing, as each of these letters had other uses. There were variousad hoc attempts to create letters—often iconic symbols—for click consonants, with the most successful being those of theStandard Alphabet by Lepsius, which were based on a single symbol (pipe, double pipe, pipe-acute, pipe-sub-dot) and from which the modernKhoekhoe 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 (seehistory of the International Phonetic Alphabet).[9]
In 1875, if not earlier, Wilhelm Bleek used the letter ⟨ʘ⟩ forbilabial clicks.[10] It was also used 1911 byLucy Lloyd.[11]
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 reportretroflex clicks.
Douglas Beach would publish a somewhat similar system in his phonetic description ofKhoekhoe. 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, ⟨𝼋⟩, based on the Lepsius letter ⟨ǂ⟩ but graphically modified to better fit the design of the IPA.
| bilabial | dental | lateral | alveolar | palatal | retroflex | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wuras ms[12] | 8 | ∧ | ⨅ | ∩ | ⅂ | |
| Boyce (1834)[13] | c | x | q | qc[14] | ||
| Knudsen (1846)[15] | ꞏ | ʼ | ʻ | ꞉ | ||
| Schreuder (1850)[16] |  |  [8] |  [8] | |||
| Lepsius (1853) | ǀc | ǀx | ǀʞ | ǀɔ | ||
| Lepsius (1854)[17] | ǀ | ǁ | ǀ̣ | ǀ́[18] | ||
| Bleek (1857) | c | x | q | ɔ | ||
| Tindall (1858)[19] | c | x | q | v | ||
| Palaeotype (1869) | 5 | 7 | ↊ | 4 | ||
| Anthropos (1907) | p | ʇ̯ (ʇ) | ʇ (ʇ̣) | ɔ +velarʞ | (ʇ̣) | |
| Lloyd (1911) | ʘ | ǀ | ǁ | ǃ | ǂ | |
| Johnston (1919)[20] | ʖ | ʖ | ʖ | ʖ | ||
| Jones (1921)[21] | ʇ | ʖ | ʗ | ʞ ('velar') | ||
| Doke (1925) | ʇ | ʖ | ʗ | ↆ | ψ | |
| Engelbrecht (1928)[22] | c | x | q | ç | ||
| Tucker (1929)[23] | ʇ | ʖ | ʗ | |||
| Beach (1938) | ʇ | ʖ | ʗ | 𝼋 | ||
| Matte & Omark (1984)[24] | ɋ | ʇ | ʖ | ʗ | 𝼋 | |
| current IPA (1989) | ʘ | ǀ | ǁ | ǃ | ǂ | 𝼊[25] |
| typewriter substitutions | @ | / | // | ! | = | !! |
| ARA proposal (1982) | ω | ʈ | λ | ɖ | ç | |
| Linguasphere (1999) | p' | c' | l' | q' | t' | |
| Lingvarium (ca. 2005) | пъ | цъ | лъ | къ | чъ | |
| Nko script (2015)[26] | ﮲ | ﮽ | ﮶ | ﮴ | ﮸ |
TheAfrican reference alphabet proposal has apparently never been used, while theLinguasphere andLingvarium transcriptions are typewriter substitutions specific to those institutions.[27]
Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on apipe 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 sameplace of articulation (called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for themanner of articulation (called the 'efflux'), treating them as two distinct sounds (the click proper and its accompaniment),[28] whereas Doke used a separate letter for eachtenuis,voiced, andnasal click, treating each as a distinct consonant, following the example of the Latin alphabet, where the voiced and nasalocclusives 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 ⟨n⟩, continuing the pattern of the pulmonic nasal consonants ⟨mɱnɲɳŋɴ⟩. For example, the letters for the palatal and retroflex clicks are ⟨ŋ⟩ ⟨ɲ⟩ 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 ⟨ʇɣ⟩ (the letter ⟨ɣ⟩ hadnot yet been added to the IPA for thevoiced velar fricative), alveolar ⟨ʗ𝒬⟩, retroflex ⟨ψ⫛⟩,[29] palatal ⟨ↆꙟ⟩ (or ⟨🡣🡡⟩) and lateral ⟨ʖ➿︎⟩. A proposal to add Doke's letters toUnicode was not approved.[30]
Beach wrote onKhoekhoe 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: ⟨𝼌𝼏𝼍𝼎⟩.
Doke and Beach both wrote aspirated clicks with anh, ⟨ʇhʗhʖh𝼋h⟩, and theglottalized nasal clicks as an oral click with a glottal stop, ⟨ʇʔʗʔʖʔ𝼋ʔ⟩. Beach also wrote the affricate contour clicks with anx, ⟨ʇxʗxʖx𝼋x⟩.
The only other script to have letters for clicks isNko, which uses them for paralinguistic use.[26]
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 [the implosive sounds] either unvoiced, voiced, or nasal."[31] Bleek therefore useddigraphs 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 ⟨D⟩ 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 aalveolar nasal stop[n] as either ⟨ⁿt⟩ or ⟨t̃⟩, analogous to the way one writes adental nasal click as ⟨ⁿǀ⟩ or ⟨ǀ̃⟩.)
Summarized below are the common means of representing voicing, nasalization and dorsal place of articulation, from Bleek's digraphs reflecting an analysis asco-articulated consonants, 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 ⟨Ʞ⟩ is used here as a wildcard for any click letter.
| Velar | Uvular | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tenuis | Voiced | Nasal | Tenuis | Voiced | Nasal | |
| Coarticulation analysis | k͜Ʞ | ɡ͜Ʞ | ŋ͜Ʞ | q͜Ʞ | ɢ͜Ʞ | ɴ͜Ʞ |
| Superscript diacritics, unitary analysis | ᵏꞰ | ᶢꞰ | ᵑꞰ | 𐞥Ʞ | 𐞒Ʞ | ᶰꞰ |
| Combining diacritics, unitary analysis | Ʞ | Ʞ̬ | Ʞ̬̃ | (NA) | ||
A distinction may be made between ⟨ᵏꞰ⟩ for an inaudible rear articulation, ⟨Ʞᵏ⟩ for an audible one, and ⟨Ʞ͜k⟩ for a notably delayed release of the rear articulation; for aspirated clicks these are ⟨ᵏꞰʰ⟩, ⟨Ʞᵏʰ⟩, ⟨Ʞ͜kʰ⟩.
In the older literature, voicing is commonly marked by a wavy diacritic under the click letter, thus:ʘ᪶ ǀ᪶ ǃ᪶ ǁ᪶ ǂ᪶.
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 onc 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 has had at least the following, using dental clicks as an example:
| Modern | ǀguis | ǀa | ǀham | ǀnu |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beach (1938) | ʇuis | ʇʔa | ʇham | 𝼍u |
| Tindall (1858) | cguis | ca | cham | cnu |
Historical roman orthographies have been based on the following sets of letters:
| dental | alveolar | lateral | palatal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xhosa (1834)[13] | c | q | x | qc[32] |
| Khoekhoe (1858) | c | q | x | v |
| Juǀʼhoan (1987–1994) | c | q | x | ç |
| Naro (2001–present) | c | q | x | tc[33] |
There are two principal conventions for writing the manners of articulation (the 'effluxes'), which are used with both the Lepsius and Zulu orthographies. One usesg for voicing andx for affricate clicks; the other usesd for voicing andg for affricate clicks. Both usen 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 thelateral clicks only.
| tenuis | voiced | nasal | glottalized | aspirated | affricated | affricated ejective | voiceless nasal | murmured | murmured nasal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zulu | > ca. 1850 | x | xg[34] | xn | xh | ||||||
| Khoekhoe | modern | ǁg | ǁn | ǁ | ǁkh | ǁh | |||||
| 1858 | xg[35] | xn | x | xkh | xh | ||||||
| Naro | > 2001 | x | dx | nx | xʼ | xh | xg | xgʼ | |||
| Juǀʼhoan | modern | ǁ | gǁ | nǁ | ǁʼ | ǁh | ǁx, gǁx | ǁk, gǁk | ǁʼh | gǁh | nǁh |
| 1975 | ǁxʼ, gǁxʼ | nǁʼh | |||||||||
| 1987 | x | dx | nx | xʼ | xh | xg, dxg | xgʼ, dxgʼ | xʼh | dxh | nxh | |
| Hadza | x | nx | xx | xh | |||||||
| Sandawe | x | gx | nx | xʼ | xh | ||||||
The following systems are presented in the same order: bilabial, dental ('c'), lateral ('x'), alveolar ('q'), palatal ('v') and retroflex ('‼'), with gaps for missing letters.
The Zulu click letters of the Norwegian mission:
Lepsius's click letters (lower case; upper case are taller):
Sundevall's click letters (lower case):
Sundevall's click letters (upper case):
Jones's IPA letters:
Doke's letters for voiceless clicks:
Doke's letters for voiced clicks:
Doke's letters for nasal clicks:
Beach's et al. letters for voiceless clicks:
Beach's letters for nasal clicks:
Post-Kiel IPA (baseline, e.g. 1989):
Post-Kiel IPA (with descenders, e.g. 2020):
Nko phonetic letters:
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Essential to the [clicks] is the peculiarity of stopping in part, and even drawing back the breath, which appears to be most easily expressed by a simple bar𝗅. If we connect with this our common marks for the cerebral [i.e. retroflex: the sub-dot] or the palatal [i.e. the acute accent], a peculiar notation is wanted only for thelateral, which is the strongest sound. We propose to express it by two bars𝗅𝗅. As the gutturals [i.e. posterior articulations] evidently do not unite with the clicks into one sound, but form a compound sound, we may make them simply to follow, as with the diphthongs.
— Lepsius (1863:80–81)