Ejectives, Implosives and Clicks

4. Ejectives, implosives and clicks

Note: Make sure that you have the Lucida Sans Unicode font installed in your computer so that the IPA symbols will display correctly.

Ejectives

It may take a bit of practice to learn how to make an ejective. Ladefoged gives some good suggestions; but you can click here for another "trick" to help you out, from the MIT linguistics department:

http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/Keys/lineup/ejectives/ejectives.html

William Smalley (p. 407) suggests imagining that you have a bit of grass on the tip of your tongue that you're trying to spit out by sticking your tongue tip out between your lips and drawing it back sharply while blowing it off; this may get you to produce an interlabial glottalized stop or ejective. Next continue on to the other places of articulation without sticking out your tongue tip. Katrina Hayward (p. 269) says to try expelling all the air from your lungs that you possibly can, then trying to pronounce a /k/. You may, without consciously trying, resort to a glottalic airstream mechanism to get it out, and thus produce an ejective [k’].

     Here are Peter Ladefoged's files of ejectives as found in Hausa, a language of northern Nigeria (Ethnologue: Hausa); the Mayan language K'ekchi, spoken in Guatemala (Ethnologue: Kekchí); and Lakhota, a native American language (Ethnologue: Lakota).

     Here's an overview of ejectives, entitled "Glottalic Pressure Stops", from Yale University:

http://www.ling.yale.edu:16080/ling120/Initiation/ejectives.html


Implosives

     More help with implosives, along with a lot of good general information on respiration and airstream mechanisms, by John Coleman at Oxford:

http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/RESPIRAT.htm

      Here are Peter Ladefoged's files of Sindhi implosives and other stops.

Clicks

     You may have already heard a click language – called !Kung – being spoken if you have seen the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy".

     Follow the links for Peter Ladefoged's files of Xhosa, !Xóõ, Zulu, and Nama clicks.

     This page has diagrams and explanations of how the alveolar lateral click written as !x or [ǁ] in IPA, the alveolo-palatal click spelled as !q [ǂ], and the dental click written as !c [ǀ] are produced. This page has audio files of each type of click.

     Hear how the word Xhosa is pronunced in this audio clip from the BBC. (Source page; last link)

     Here's some information about the Nama people, culture and languages, and here is an overview of African languages. Here is a recent (8/15/02) BBC report on Bushmen in Botswana which mentions clicks; here is a feature with sound file from BBC Radio that introduces the traditional life of the Bushmen.

     Click below for an impressive X-ray video of clicks being articulated, again from Peter Ladefoged's site:

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/vowels/chapter13/movie.html

     On the following page, from the Vocal Tract Visualization Lab of the Dental School of the University of Maryland Baltimore, you will find videos of Nama clicks being produced.

http://www.speech.umaryland.edu/wierd.html

     Here, from the University of Manitoba, is a short overview of the basic clicks, plus a link to a sound file of a folktale told in Nama, together with a transcription and English translation. The speaker reads quite slowly, so you can try to follow along in the transcription as you listen to the sound file:

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/module2/click.html

     This page from the University of Stuttgart has a nice sound file of clicks:

http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/phonetik/EGG/page5.htm

     Here are two audio files of click language samples from Peter Roach's site, University of Reading, UK:

http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/fue/clicks1.wav
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/fue/clicks2.wav

     Here are some links to recordings of two extinct click languages; one is a lullaby:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/elr/extinct.html

     Clear Speech author Judy Gilbert contributed this tidbit on clicks, taken from the novel Tears of the Giraffe, second in a series of stories about Botswana, by Alexander McCall Smith:

     [A man is suspected of being a Kalahari San bushman because of his racial appearance...] "The man spoke correct Setswana, but his accent confirmed the visible signs. Underneath the vowels, there were clicks and whistles struggling to get out. It was a peculiar language, the San language, more like the sound of birds in the trees than people talking."

     Some time ago there was a discussion over the LINGUIST list regarding a Ricoh copier ad which appeared on TV in the US and in a number of major world news magazines. The ad shows a picture of a Khoi tribal leader named Chief Obijol, and includes this line:

     "With a series of simple clicking sounds, he can teach a force of 200 men to hunt, to treat an illness, even how to find an appropriate mate."

     I doubt anybody who has studied clicks in depth would call them "simple"!

Here are links to the relevant posts: 1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9


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