End of ADS-L Digest - 13 Oct 1997 to 14 Oct 1997 ************************************************ 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_ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 12:07:46 -0400 From: "Dennis R. Preston" 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