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; another, previously posted on the MIT site but no longer
available:
In order to practice making an ejective sound,
start by holding your breath. Now, while you're still holding your breath,
try to make a "k" sound; make the sound as loudly as you can, so
that somebody sitting next to you can hear it. Now relax and breathe again.
Congratulations! You've just made an ejective k¡¦.
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 Louis Goldstein at the University of Southern California:
http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/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:
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". (Note also the sample of !Kung music linked
to in the !Kung link.) Here
is a National Geographic video on the San People of Namibia, with clear samples
of their language.
Here Russell
Peters has fun with click languages on YouTube.
Follow the links for Peter Ladefoged's files
of Xhosa,
!Xóõ,
Zulu,
and Nama
clicks.
Here is a YouTube video on the Nama
clicks; here's one on the Xhosa
clicks, and here's one of a fun Xhosa
click song. Here is a video lesson of the KhoeKhoegowab
language, one of the most widespread of the Bushman click languages of Namibia.
Look for more videos on YouTube. 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://speech.umaryland.edu/funmovies.html
This page from the University
of Stuttgart has a nice sound file of clicks:
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
Online
exerices:
1. Hausa
Consonant
test:
Can
you hear the difference between Hausa glottalized consonants and their plain
counterparts?
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/aflang/Hausa/Pronunciation/constest.html
2. Lakhota
Glottalized
and aspirated stops; oral and nasal vowels; stress;
h
and x aspirated stops.
a. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/glottalized_stops.htm
b. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/h_aspirated_stops.htm
c. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/vowels.htm
d. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/vowels_nasal.htm
e. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/oral_nasal.htm
f. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/stress.htm
g. http://www.inext.cz/siouan/DRILLS/x_aspirated_stops.htm
3. Quechua
(from Ladefoged)
Quechua
contrasts uvular and velar stops, and palatoalveolar affricates. Each of these
may occur in three varieties: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated,
and ejective. Please transcribe each of the words.
http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Listening/Quechua/Quechua.html
Here are more pages with sound files of Quechua speech:
http://www.quechua.org.uk/Eng/Sounds/Home/HomeWordsDirect001to005.htm
http://www.andes.org/count.html
http://www.andes.org/q_index.html
4. Sindhi
Stops,
including implosives (from Ladefoged)
http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Listening/Sindhi/sindhi.html
5. Listen to a voiced uvular implosive
Use
Audacity to open this .ogg file
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Image:Voiced-uvular-implosive.ogg
6. Hear click languages spoken on the radio
a. Zulu
radio (Click
on "Listen Live" and "continue"; leave the homepage to
turn off repeating audio)
b. Xhosa
radio (Click
on "Listen Live" and "continue"; leave the homepage to
turn off repeating audio)
c. Thobela
(Northern Sotho) FM (SePedi)
d.
Radio
Botswana (SeTswana)
Next:
Trills,
L2 accent, and posting to LINGUIST