Anonymous asked:
i live in a part of south africa where isiXhosa is the primary language spoken and its the worst because you cant whisper in class because the clicks are so loud the teacher WILL hear you
jabalinya-deactivated20230507:
jabalinya-deactivated20230507:
Oh shit I’d never thought about this. But yeah, it makes sense. Clicks are so sonorous.
Gonna add this here because relevancy.
(Lowkey this is a working theory towards the origin of the phonemes)
Here’s the source: Güldemann (2007)
Word of caution this guy has weird big picture ideas of languages in Africa, so you know, read critically.
Most speakers of click languages in southern Africa do not talk during hunts. They have very specialized sign languages which they use for hunting communication. There is a paper comparing signs from the Ts’ixa, Khwe, ǁAni and Ju|’hoan communities (here), which makes me doubt that there is a special “click” language for hunts (there may be a confusion with specific praise names for animals which exist among the Ju|’hoan - this has nothing to do with hunting practices and does not signify a higher click load). In general, I doubt clicks arose in hunting contexts (which has been speculated about A LOT, also in the context of language origins).
Clicks in educational contexts are interesting. Besides not being able to whisper in class, many of my friends who went to school in Botswana during the 80s and 90s were punished for using their mother tongues on school grounds and in hostels - even during leisure time. They hence started to drop clicks and replace them by non-click consonants. This usually does not interfere much with intelligibility and may be at the heart of rapid click loss as found in some Khoe-Kwadi-speaking communities like the Ts’ixa.




















