End of ADS-L Digest - 13 Oct 1997 to 14 Oct 1997
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Subject: ADS-L Digest - 14 Oct 1997 to 15 Oct 1997
There are 3 messages totalling 135 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

 1. Xhosa (2)
 2. Etymology of _Hoosier_

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Date:  Wed, 15 Oct 1997 12:07:46 -0400
From:  "Dennis R. Preston" <preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]PILOT.MSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Xhosa

Larry is short one coarticulation (or 'co-coarticulation') possibility with
the clicks.

They may be plain (x,c,q), or

'voiced' (or 'glottalized' as some Ngunists [Nguni being the name of the
southeastern Bantu sub-group to which isiXhosa belongs] prefer to say - gx,
gc, gq), or

nasalized (nx, nc, nq), or

aspirated (xh, ch, qh),

as Larry points out, but they may also be 'Naso-glottalized' - ngx, ngc, ngq,

yielding a fifteen-way rather than telve way set of phonemic distinctions.

Bob Herbert has a very interesting article on the sociocultural environment
which has to do with the borrowing of clicks into Nguni from the Khoisan
languages (related to a tabu concerning fermale uses of male names);
publication details escape me at the moment, but I think the title was 'The
sociohistory of clicks in Southern Bantu' and I'm pretty sure it appeared
in Anthropological Linguistics.

Dennis






>>Sorry to bother dialecticians with this, but I have no other immediate
>>source. Do any of you know if (and how long) Xnghossa (South african
>>"click" language that I may have misspelled) has a writing system of the
>>language. how are the clicks "written"? thanks.
>
>The language in question is Xhosa (more formally, isiXhosa), and the X there
>is the representation of one of the three positions in which clicks occur,
>the lateral one. Besides the laterals, there are retroflex or palatal (or
>"domal") clicks, represented as Q, and dental/alveolar clicks, represented as
>C. Any of these can be "voiced" (the voicing is phonetically realized by its
>effect on the adjacent vowel tone; in fact I think a voiced click per se is
>physically impossible), or nasalized (represented with an N before the click
>letter), or aspirated (represented with an H after the click letter, as in the
>name of the language). Sister languages in the southern Bantu group that have
>clicks are Zulu and Ndebele. The true "click languages", though, are from an
>unrelated family, Khoisan (the one spoken in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy"
>which may or may not help), e.g. (in the Western naming tradition) Bushman and
>Hottentot. It is these languages from which the southern Bantu ones borrowed
>their clicks, and in the Khoisan languages I understand they're much more
>prevalent. (Sorry I can't answer your question about how long Xhosa has been
>written.)
>--Larry

Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736