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 on Wikipedia. Here is a 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 relation
between man and nature in Bushman life.
Click below for an impressive X-ray video of
clicks being articulated, again from Peter Ladefoged's site:
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/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: