Tenuis lateral click
![]() | This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2021) |
Tenuis lateral velar click | |
---|---|
k͡ǁ | |
ᵏʖ | |
IPA Number | 180, 203 |
Encoding | |
Entity (decimal) | ǁʖ |
Unicode (hex) | U+01C1 U+0296 |
Braille | ![]() ![]() |
Audio sample | |
source · help |
Tenuis lateral uvular click | |
---|---|
q͡ǁ | |
(etc) |
The voiceless or more precisely tenuis lateral click is a click consonant found primarily among the languages of southern Africa. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ǁ⟩. The Doke/ convention, adopted for a time by the IPA and still preferred by some linguists, is ⟨ʖ⟩.[1][2][3][4]
Features[]
Features of the tenuis lateral click:
- The airstream mechanism is lingual ingressive (also known as velaric ingressive), which means a pocket of air trapped between two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue, rather than being moved by the glottis or the lungs/diaphragm. The release of the forward closure produces the "click" sound. Voiced and nasal clicks have a simultaneous pulmonic egressive airstream.
- Its phonation is voiceless, unaspirated, and unglottalized, which means it is produced without vibration or constriction of the vocal cords, and any following vowel starts without significant delay.
- It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
- It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
Occurrence[]
Tenuis lateral clicks are found primarily in the various Khoisan language families of southern Africa and in some neighboring Bantu languages.
Language | Word | IPA | Meaning |
---|---|---|---|
Hadza | exekeke | [ʔeǁekeke] = [ʔeʖekeke] | 'to listen' |
Khoekhoe | ǂamǁgû | [ᵑǂ͡ʔàm̀ǁṹṹ] = [ǂ̃ˀàm̀ʖṹṹ] | 'to inadvertently bite a hard object' |
Xhosa | inxeba | [íŋǁeːɓa] = [íŋʖeːɓa] | 'wound' (noun) |
Zulu | xoxa | [ǁɔːǁa] = [ʖɔːʖa] | 'to converse' |
References[]
- ^ Doke, Clement M. (1925). "An outline of the phonetics of the language of the ʗhũ: Bushman of the North-West Kalahari". Bantu Studies. 2: 129–166. doi:10.1080/02561751.1923.9676181.
- ^ Doke, Clement M. (1969) [1926]. The phonetics of the Zulu language. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.
- ^ Beach, Douglas Martyn (1938). The phonetics of the Hottentot language. London: W. Heffer & Sons.
- ^ Styled as either a digit ⟨5⟩ with the top removed, or an inverted glottal stop ⟨ʔ⟩. It perhaps derives from a cedilla written the size of a full letter.
Categories:
- Click consonants
- Lateral consonants
- Oral consonants
- Tenuis consonants