Hottentot (British and South African English / ˈ h ɒ t ən ˌ t ɒ t / HOT -ən- TOT ) is a term that was historically used by Europeans to refer to the Khoekhoe , the indigenous nomadic pastoralists in South Africa .
70-564: Hottentot may refer to: Language [ edit ] Hottentot (racial term) , in English Khoekhoe language Khoisan language Peoples [ edit ] Griqua people Khoekhoe , a South African ethnic group Khoisan , a wider group including the Khoikhoi Arts and entertainment [ edit ] The Hottentot (1922 film) The Hottentot ,
140-557: A "slapped" alveolar click, provisionally transcribed ⟨ ǃ¡ ⟩ (in turn, the lateral clicks in Sandawe are more abrupt and less noisy than in southern Africa). However, the Khoisan languages are poorly attested, and it is quite possible that, as they become better described, more click articulations will be found. Formerly when a click consonant was transcribed, two symbols were used, one for each articulation, and connected with
210-428: A 1929 film Hottentottilaulu ("The Hottentot Song"), a Finnish song Hottentot Venus , one of two Khoikhoi women exhibited as freak-show attractions Life forms [ edit ] Hottentot (fish) , a sea bream species Africanis , a landrace of dog Carpobrotus edulis , or hottentot-fig Dioscorea elephantipes , or hottentot bread Trachyandra , or hottentot cabbage Blue-billed teal ,
280-577: A black person". Use of the derived term hotnot was explicitly proscribed in South Africa by 2008. Accordingly, much recent scholarship on the history of colonial attitudes to the Khoisan or on the European trope of "the Hottentot" puts the term Hottentot in scare quotes . In its original role of ethnic designator, the term Hottentot was included into a variety of derived terms, such as
350-407: A click (lingual) articulation to a normal pulmonic consonant like [ ɢ ] (e.g. [ǀ͡ɢ] ); or linguo-glottalic and transition from lingual to an ejective consonant like [ qʼ ] (e.g. [ǀ͡qʼ] ): that is, a sequence of ingressive (lingual) release + egressive (pulmonic or glottalic) release. In some cases there is a shift in place of articulation as well, and instead of a uvular release,
420-521: A click close a syllable or end a word, but since the languages of the world that happen to have clicks consist mostly of CV syllables and allow at most only a limited set of consonants (such as a nasal or a glottal stop) to close a syllable or end a word, most consonants share the distribution of clicks in these languages. Most languages of the Khoesan families (Tuu, Kxʼa and Khoe) have four click types: { ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ } or variants thereof, though
490-405: A duck species Hottentotta , a scorpion genus Organisations [ edit ] Cape Corps , formerly Hottentot Corps , a South African army unit Terre Haute Hottentots , a baseball team Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Hottentot . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change
560-552: A few dozen words. It is thought the latter may remain from an episode of language shift . The only non-African language known to have clicks as regular speech sounds is Damin , a ritual code once used by speakers of Lardil in Australia . In addition, one consonant in Damin is the egressive equivalent of a click, using the tongue to compress the air in the mouth for an outward (egressive) "spurt". Once clicks are borrowed into
630-796: A few have three or five, the last supplemented with either bilabial { ʘ } or retroflex { 𝼊 }. Hadza and Sandawe in Tanzania have three, { ǀ ǁ ǃ }. Yeyi is the only Bantu language with four, { ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ }, while Xhosa and Zulu have three, { ǀ ǁ ǃ }, and most other Bantu languages with clicks have fewer. Like other consonants, clicks can be described using four parameters: place of articulation , manner of articulation , phonation (including glottalisation) and airstream mechanism . As noted above, clicks necessarily involve at least two closures, which in some cases operate partially independently: an anterior articulation traditionally represented by
700-552: A language as regular speech sounds, they may spread to native words, as has happened due to hlonipa word-taboo in the Nguni languages . In Gciriku , for example, the European loanword tomate (tomato) appears as cumáte with a click [ǀ] , though it begins with a t in all neighbouring languages. It has also been argued that click phonemes have been adopted into some languages through the process of hlonipha , women refraining from saying certain words and sounds that were similar to
770-751: A lesser extent Swazi and Ndebele ), and spread from them in a reduced fashion to the Zulu-based pidgin Fanagalo , Sesotho , Tsonga , Ronga , the Mzimba dialect of Tumbuka and more recently to Ndau and urban varieties of Pedi , where the spread of clicks continues. The second point of transfer was near the Caprivi Strip and the Okavango River where, apparently, the Yeyi language borrowed
SECTION 10
#1732765021570840-471: A lot of friction. The next two families of clicks are more abrupt sounds that do not have this friction. Technically, these IPA letters transcribe only the forward articulation of the click, not the entire consonant. As the Handbook states, Since any click involves a velar or uvular closure [as well], it is possible to symbolize factors such as voicelessness, voicing or nasality of the click by combining
910-509: A perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial". Thus, it can be said that the European, colonial image of "the Hottentot" from the seventeenth century onwards bore little relation to any realities of the Khoisan in Africa, and that this image fed into the usage of hottentot as a generalised derogatory term. Correspondingly, the word is "sometimes used as ugly slang for
980-400: A syllabic nasal before its three clicks, as in nnqane 'the other side' (prenasalised nasal) and seqhenqha 'hunk'. There is ongoing discussion as to how the distinction between what were historically described as 'velar' and 'uvular' clicks is best described. The 'uvular' clicks are only found in some languages, and have an extended pronunciation that suggests that they are more complex than
1050-415: A third place of articulation, glottal. A glottal stop is made during the hold of the click; the (necessarily voiceless) click is released, and then the glottal hold is released into the vowel. Glottalised clicks are very common, and they are generally nasalised as well. The nasalisation cannot be heard during the click release, as there is no pulmonic airflow, and generally not at all when the click occurs at
1120-595: A tie bar. This is because a click such as [ɢ͡ǀ] was analysed as a voiced uvular rear articulation [ɢ] pronounced simultaneously with the forward ingressive release [ǀ] . The symbols may be written in either order, depending on the analysis: ⟨ ɢ͡ǀ ⟩ or ⟨ ǀ͡ɢ ⟩. However, a tie bar was not often used in practice, and when the manner is tenuis (a simple [k] ), it was often omitted as well. That is, ⟨ ǂ ⟩ = ⟨ kǂ ⟩ = ⟨ ǂk ⟩ = ⟨ k͡ǂ ⟩ = ⟨ ǂ͡k ⟩. Regardless, elements that do not overlap with
1190-456: A tongue-twister in modern Dutch, "Hottentottententententoonstelling", meaning a "Hottentot tent exhibition". In the 1964 film Mary Poppins , Admiral Boom mistakes the rooftop-dancing chimney sweeps for an attack by "Hottentots". In 2024, the BBFC raised the film's age rating from U to PG due to this instance of "discriminatory language". The name of Reiner Knizia 's game " Schotten-Totten "
1260-544: A typical click, but the action is reversed and it is the rear velar or uvular closure that is released, drawing in air from the throat and nasal passages. Clicks occasionally turn up elsewhere, as in the special registers twins sometimes develop with each other. In West Africa , clicks have been reported allophonically, and similarly in French and German, faint clicks have been recorded in rapid speech where consonants such as /t/ and /k/ overlap between words. In Rwanda ,
1330-407: A uvular rear closure, and the clicks explicitly described as uvular are in fact cases where the uvular closure is independently audible: contours of a click into a pulmonic or ejective component, in which the click has two release bursts, the forward (click-type) and then the rearward (uvular) component. "Velar" clicks in these languages have only a single release burst, that of the forward release, and
1400-450: A vowel, such as the dental "tsk-tsk" sound used to express disapproval, or the lateral tchick used with horses. In a number of languages ranging from the central Mediterranean to Iran, a bare dental click release accompanied by tipping the head upwards signifies "no". Libyan Arabic apparently has three such sounds. A voiceless nasal back-released velar click [ʞ] is used throughout Africa for backchanneling . This sound starts off as
1470-457: Is a portmanteau of the German words "Schotten" ( Scottish people ) and "Hottentotten" (Hottentots). The Sheakspearers Sister 1992 song "I Don't Care" from the album "Hormonally Yours" includes the lines: "In a boreolic iceberg came Victoria Queen Victoria sitting shocked upon on the rocking horse of a wave Said to the laurette, this minx of course, Is sharp as any linx and blacker, deeper Than
SECTION 20
#17327650215701540-433: Is a great variety of click manners, both simplex and complex, the latter variously analysed as consonant clusters or contours . With so few click languages, and so little study of them, it is also unclear to what extent clicks in different languages are equivalent. For example, the [ǃkˀ] of Khoekhoe, [ǃkˀ ~ ŋˀǃk] of Sandawe and [ŋ̊ǃˀ ~ ŋǃkˀ] of Hadza may be essentially the same phone; no language distinguishes them, and
1610-645: Is also used for the accompaniment/efflux. There are seven or eight known places of articulation, not counting slapped or egressive clicks. These are (bi)labial affricated ʘ , or "bilabial"; laminal denti-alveolar affricated ǀ , or "dental"; apical (post)alveolar plosive ǃ , or "alveolar"; laminal palatal plosive ǂ , or "palatal"; laminal palatal affricated ǂᶴ (known only from Ekoka !Kung ); subapical postalveolar 𝼊 , or " retroflex " (only known from Central !Kung and possibly Damin); and apical (post)alveolar lateral ǁ , or "lateral". Languages illustrating each of these articulations are listed below. Given
1680-750: Is found across West Africa, the Caribbean and into the United States. The exact place of the alveolar clicks varies between languages. The lateral, for example, is alveolar in Khoekhoe but postalveolar or even palatal in Sandawe; the central is alveolar in Nǀuu but postalveolar in Juǀʼhoan. The terms for the click types were originally developed by Bleek in 1862. Since then there has been some conflicting variation. However, apart from "cerebral" (retroflex), which
1750-488: Is incompatible with epiglottalisation. As do other consonants, clicks vary in phonation . Oral clicks are attested with four phonations: tenuis , aspirated , voiced and breathy voiced (murmured). Nasal clicks may also vary, with plain voiced, breathy voiced / murmured nasal, aspirated and unaspirated voiceless clicks attested (the last only in Taa). The aspirated nasal clicks are often said to have 'delayed aspiration'; there
1820-495: Is nasal airflow throughout the click, which may become voiced between vowels, though the aspiration itself is voiceless. A few languages also have pre-glottalised nasal clicks, which have very brief prenasalisation but have not been phonetically analysed to the extent that other types of clicks have. All languages have nasal clicks, and all but Dahalo and Damin also have oral clicks. All languages but Damin have at least one phonation contrast as well. Clicks may be pronounced with
1890-429: Is sometimes seen combined with diacritics for voicing (e.g. ⟨ ǂ̬ ⟩ for [ɡ͡ǂ] ), nasalization (e.g. ⟨ ǂ̃ ⟩ for [ŋ͡ǂ] ), etc. These differing transcription conventions may reflect differing theoretical analyses of the nature of click consonants, or attempts to address common misunderstandings of clicks. Clicks occur in all three Khoisan language families of southern Africa , where they may be
1960-481: Is sometimes substituted as a name for the people, particularly in scholarly contexts". Yet, by the 1980s, because of the racist connotations discussed below, it was increasingly seen as too derogatory and offensive to be used in an ethnic sense. From the eighteenth century onwards, the term hottentot was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to barbarian or cannibal . According to James Boswell's The Life of Johnson , Samuel Johnson
2030-474: Is then released, producing what may be the loudest consonants in the language, although in some languages such as Hadza and Sandawe , clicks can be more subtle and may even be mistaken for ejectives . Click consonants occur at six principal places of articulation. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) provides five letters for these places (there is as yet no dedicated symbol for the sixth). The above clicks sound like affricates , in that they involve
2100-527: Is written g! or dq , and /ᵏǃ͡χ/ !x or qg . In languages without /ᵏǃ͡χ/ , such as Zulu, /ᶢǃ/ may be written gq . There are a few less-well-attested articulations. A reported subapical retroflex articulation ⟨ 𝼊 ⟩ in Grootfontein !Kung turns out to be alveolar with lateral release, ⟨ ǃ𐞷 ⟩; Ekoka !Kung has a fricated alveolar click with an s-like release, provisionally transcribed ⟨ ǃ͡s ⟩; and Sandawe has
2170-465: The tut-tut (British spelling) or tsk! tsk! (American spelling) used to express disapproval or pity (IPA [ǀ] ), the tchick! used to spur on a horse (IPA [ǁ] ), and the clip-clop! sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting (IPA [ǃ] ). However, these paralinguistic sounds in English are not full click consonants, as they only involve the front of the tongue, without
Hottentot - Misplaced Pages Continue
2240-787: The Hottentot Corps , the first Coloured unit to be formed in the South African army, originally called the Corps Bastaard Hottentoten ( Dutch ; in English: "Corps Bastard Hottentots"), organised in 1781 by the Dutch colonial administration of the time. The word is also used in the common names of a wide variety of plants and animals, such as the Africanis dogs sometimes called "Hottentot hunting dogs",
2310-757: The Kxʼa and Tuu (Northern and Southern Khoisan) languages. Taa , the last vibrant language in the latter family, has 45 to 115 click phonemes, depending on analysis (clusters vs. contours), and over 70% of words in the dictionary of this language begin with a click. Clicks appear more stop -like (sharp/abrupt) or affricate -like (noisy) depending on their place of articulation: In southern Africa, clicks involving an apical alveolar or laminal postalveolar closure are acoustically abrupt and sharp, like stops, whereas labial , dental and lateral clicks typically have longer and acoustically noisier click types that are superficially more like affricates. In East Africa, however,
2380-550: The Nǁng language and Juǀʼhoan , this is associated with a difference in the placement of the rear articulation: "grave" clicks are uvular , whereas "acute" clicks are pharyngeal .) Thus the alveolar click /ǃ/ sounds something like a cork pulled from a bottle (a low-pitch pop), at least in Xhosa; whereas the dental click /ǀ/ is like English tsk! tsk!, a high-pitched sucking on the incisors. The lateral clicks are pronounced by sucking on
2450-531: The release or influx), whereas the manner is ascribed to the posterior articulation (called the accompaniment or efflux). The anterior articulation defines the click type and is written with the IPA letter for the click (dental ⟨ ǀ ⟩, alveolar ⟨ ǃ ⟩, etc.), whereas the traditional term 'accompaniment' conflates the categories of manner (nasal, affricated), phonation (voiced, aspirated, breathy voiced, glottalised), as well as any change in
2520-510: The IPA have started to appear: ⟨ ǀ̥, ǀ̬, ǀ̃, ŋǀ̬ ⟩ for ⟨ ᵏǀ, ᶢǀ, ᵑǀ, ŋᶢǀ ⟩. In practical orthography, the voicing or nasalisation is sometimes given the anterior place of articulation: dc for ᶢǀ and mʘ for ᵑʘ , for example. In the literature on Damin, the clicks are transcribed by adding ⟨!⟩ to the homorganic nasal: ⟨m!, nh!, n!, rn!⟩ . Places of articulation are often called click types, releases, or influxes, though 'release'
2590-548: The airstream with the release of the posterior articulation (pulmonic, ejective), all of which are transcribed with additional letters or diacritics, as in the nasal alveolar click , ⟨ ǃŋ ⟩ or ⟨ ᵑǃ ⟩ or—to take an extreme example—the voiced (uvular) ejective alveolar click , ⟨ ᶢǃ͡qʼ ⟩. The size of click inventories ranges from as few as three (in Sesotho ) or four (in Dahalo ), to dozens in
2660-593: The alveolar clicks tend to be flapped , whereas the lateral clicks tend to be more sharp. The five click places of articulation with dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are labial ʘ , dental ǀ , palatal ("palato-alveolar") ǂ , (post)alveolar ("retroflex") ǃ and lateral ǁ . In most languages, the alveolar and palatal types are abrupt; that is, they are sharp popping sounds with little frication (turbulent airflow). The labial, dental and lateral types, on
2730-587: The beginning of an utterance, but it has the effect of nasalising preceding vowels, to the extent that the glottalised clicks of Sandawe and Hadza are often described as prenasalised when in medial position. Two languages, Gǀwi and Yeyi , contrast plain and nasal glottalised clicks, but in languages without such a contrast, the glottalised click is nasal. Miller (2011) analyses the glottalisation as phonation, and so considers these to be simple clicks. Various languages also have prenasalised clicks, which may be analysed as consonant sequences. Sotho , for example, allows
2800-438: The click symbol with the appropriate velar or uvular symbol: [k͡ǂ ɡ͡ǂ ŋ͡ǂ] , [q͡ǃ] . Thus technically [ǂ] is not a consonant, but only one part of the articulation of a consonant, and one may speak of "ǂ-clicks" to mean any of the various click consonants that share the [ǂ] place of articulation. In practice, however, the simple letter ⟨ ǂ ⟩ has long been used as an abbreviation for [k͡ǂ] , and in that role it
2870-858: The clicks from a West Kalahari Khoe language ; a separate development led to a smaller click inventory in the neighbouring Mbukushu , Kwangali , Gciriku , Kuhane and Fwe languages in Angola , Namibia , Botswana and Zambia . These sounds occur not only in borrowed vocabulary, but have spread to native Bantu words as well, in the case of Nguni at least partially due to a type of word taboo called hlonipha . Some creolised varieties of Afrikaans, such as Oorlams , retain clicks in Khoekhoe words. Three languages in East Africa use clicks: Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania , and Dahalo , an endangered South Cushitic language of Kenya that has clicks in only
Hottentot - Misplaced Pages Continue
2940-511: The differences in transcription may have more to do with the approach of the linguist than with actual differences in the sounds. Such suspected allophones/allographs are listed on a common row in the table below. Some Khoisan languages are typologically unusual in allowing mixed voicing in non-click consonant clusters/contours, such as ̬d̥sʼk͡x , so it is not surprising that they would allow mixed voicing in clicks as well. This may be an effect of epiglottalised voiced consonants, because voicing
3010-688: The drinks as hot as any hottentot " Click consonant U+01C0 ǀ LATIN LETTER DENTAL CLICK U+01C1 ǁ LATIN LETTER LATERAL CLICK U+01C2 ǂ LATIN LETTER ALVEOLAR CLICK U+01C3 ǃ LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK U+01DF0A 𝼊 LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK WITH RETROFLEX HOOK U+2016 ‖ DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE U+0021 ! EXCLAMATION MARK Click consonants , or clicks , are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa . Examples familiar to English-speakers are
3080-457: The ejective release follows the click release, it is the rear closure of the click that is ejective, not an independently articulated consonant. That is, in a simple click, the release of the rear articulation is not audible, whereas in a contour click, the rear (uvular) articulation is audibly released after the front (click) articulation, resulting in a double release. These contour clicks may be linguo-pulmonic , that is, they may transition from
3150-484: The fact that the front and rear articulations are independent, and to use diacritics to indicate the rear articulation and the accompaniment. At first this tended to be ⟨ ᵏǀ, ᶢǀ, ᵑǀ ⟩ for ⟨ k͡ǀ, ɡ͡ǀ, ŋ͡ǀ ⟩, based on the belief that the rear articulation was velar; but as it has become clear that the rear articulation is often uvular or even pharyngeal even when there is no velar–uvular contrast, voicing and nasalisation diacritics more in keeping with
3220-418: The fish Pachymetopon blochii , frequently simply called hottentots , Carpobrotus edulis , commonly known as a "hottentot-fig", and Trachyandra , commonly known as "hottentot cabbage". It has also given rise to the scientific name for one genus of scorpion , Hottentotta , and may be the origin of the epithet tottum in the botanical name Leucospermum tottum . The word is still used as part of
3290-403: The forward release are usually written according to their temporal order: Prenasalisation is always written first (⟨ ɴɢ͡ǀ ⟩ = ⟨ ɴǀ͡ɢ ⟩ = ⟨ ɴǀ̬ ⟩), and the non-lingual part of a contour is always written second (⟨ k͡ǀʼqʼ ⟩ = ⟨ ǀ͡kʼqʼ ⟩ = ⟨ ǀ͡qʼ ⟩). However, it is common to analyse clicks as simplex segments, despite
3360-528: The latter and with slaves brought by them from Indonesia to form the hybrid population known today as the Cape Coloured ." The term Hottentot remained in use as a technical ethnic term in anthropological and historiographical literature into the late 1980s. The 1996 edition of the Dictionary of South African English merely says that "the word 'Hottentot' is seen by some as offensive and Khoikhoi
3430-432: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hottentot&oldid=1258505665 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Language and nationality disambiguation pages Hottentot (racial term) Use of
3500-606: The modern term Khoisan (not only the Khoikhoi, but also the San people , hunter-gatherer populations from the interior of southern Africa who had not been known to the seventeenth-century settlers, once often referred to as Bosjesmannen in Dutch and Bushmen in English). In George Murdock 's Atlas of World Cultures (1981), the author refers to "Hottentots" as a "subfamily of the Khoisan linguistic family" who "became detribalized in contact with Dutch settlers in 1652, mixing with
3570-409: The molars of one or both sides. The labial click /ʘ/ is different from what many people associate with a kiss: the lips are pressed more-or-less flat together, as they are for a [p] or an [m] , not rounded as they are for a [w] . The most populous languages with clicks, Zulu and Xhosa, use the letters c, q, x, by themselves and in digraphs , to write click consonants. Most Khoisan languages, on
SECTION 50
#17327650215703640-475: The most numerous consonants. To a lesser extent they occur in three neighbouring groups of Bantu languages —which borrowed them , directly or indirectly, from Khoisan. In the southeast, in eastern South Africa , Eswatini , Lesotho , Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique , they were adopted from a Tuu language (or languages) by the languages of the Nguni cluster (especially Zulu , Xhosa and Phuthi , but also to
3710-503: The name of their husband, sometimes replacing local sounds by borrowing clicks from a nearby language. Scattered clicks are found in ideophones and mimesis in other languages, such as Kongo /ᵑǃ/ , Mijikenda /ᵑǀ/ and Hadza /ᵑʘʷ/ (Hadza does not otherwise have labial clicks). Ideophones often use phonemic distinctions not found in normal vocabulary. English and many other languages may use bare click releases in interjections , without an accompanying rear release or transition into
3780-546: The nursery rhyme is, where the /ŋ/ onsets are all pronounced [ᵑǃ¡] . Occasionally other languages are claimed to have click sounds in general vocabulary. This is usually a misnomer for ejective consonants , which are found across much of the world. For the most part, the Southern African Khoisan languages only use root -initial clicks. Hadza, Sandawe and several Bantu languages also allow syllable -initial clicks within roots. In no language does
3850-593: The other hand (with the notable exceptions of Naro and Sandawe ), use a more iconic system based on the pipe ⟨|⟩ . (The exclamation point for the "retroflex" click was originally a pipe with a subscript dot, along the lines of ṭ, ḍ, ṇ used to transcribe the retroflex consonants of India.) There are also two main conventions for the second letter of the digraph as well: voicing may be written with g and uvular affrication with x , or voicing with d and affrication with g (a convention of Afrikaans). In two orthographies of Juǀʼhoan, for example, voiced /ᶢǃ/
3920-521: The other hand, are typically noisy: they are longer, lip- or tooth-sucking sounds with turbulent airflow, and are sometimes called affricates. (This applies to the forward articulation; both may also have either an affricate or non-affricate rear articulation as well.) The apical places, ǃ and ǁ , are sometimes called "grave", because their pitch is dominated by low frequencies; whereas the laminal places, ǀ and ǂ , are sometimes called "acute", because they are dominated by high frequencies. (At least in
3990-500: The places of articulation, the terms listed under Vosser (2013) in the table above have become standard, apart from such details as whether in a particular language ǃ and ǁ are alveolar or postalveolar, or whether the rear articulation is velar, uvular or pharyngeal, which again varies between languages (or may even be contrastive within a language). Click manners are often called click accompaniments or effluxes , but both terms have met with objections on theoretical grounds. There
4060-624: The poor state of documentation of Khoisan languages, it is quite possible that additional places of articulation will turn up. No language is known to contrast more than five. Extra-linguistically, Coatlán Zapotec of Mexico uses a linguolabial click, [ǀ̼ʔ] , as mimesis for a pig drinking water, and several languages, such as Wolof , use a velar click [ʞ] , long judged to be physically impossible, for backchanneling and to express approval. An extended dental click with lip pursing or compression (" sucking-teeth "), variable in sound and sometimes described as intermediate between [ǀ] and [ʘ] ,
4130-424: The release of the back of the tongue that is required for clicks to combine with vowels and form syllables. Anatomically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures (points of contact) in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue (in technical terminology, clicks have a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism ). The forward closure
4200-400: The release of the rear articulation isn't audible. However, in other languages all clicks are velar, and a few languages, such as Taa , have a true velar–uvular distinction that depends on the place rather than the timing of rear articulation and that is audible in the quality of the vowel. Regardless, in most of the literature the stated place of the click is the anterior articulation (called
4270-639: The sequence /mŋ/ may be pronounced either with an epenthetic vowel, [mᵊ̃ŋ] , or with a light bilabial click, [m𐞵̃ŋ] —often by the same speaker. Speakers of Gan Chinese from Ningdu county, as well as speakers of Mandarin from Beijing and Jilin and presumably people from other parts of the country, produce flapped nasal clicks in nursery rhymes with varying degrees of competence, in the words for 'goose' and 'duck', both of which begin with /ŋ/ in Gan and until recently began with /ŋ/ in Mandarin as well. In Gan,
SECTION 60
#17327650215704340-590: The simple ('velar') clicks, which are found in all. Nakagawa (1996) describes the extended clicks in Gǀwi as consonant clusters , sequences equivalent to English st or pl , whereas Miller (2011) analyses similar sounds in several languages as click–non-click contours , where a click transitions into a pulmonic or ejective articulation within a single segment, analogous to how English ch and j transition from occlusive to fricative but still behave as unitary sounds. With ejective clicks, for example, Miller finds that although
4410-469: The special click symbol in the IPA—and a posterior articulation traditionally transcribed for convenience as oral or nasal , voiced or voiceless, though such features actually apply to the entire consonant. The literature also describes a contrast between velar and uvular rear articulations for some languages. In some languages that have been reported to make this distinction, such as Nǁng , all clicks have
4480-588: The term Hottentot is now considered offensive, the preferred name for the non Bantu speaking indigenous people of the Western Cape area being Khoekhoe (formerly Khoikhoi ). Hottentot originated among the "old Dutch" settlers of the Dutch Cape Colony run by United East India Company ( VOC ), who arrived in the region in the 1650s, and it entered English usage from Dutch in the seventeenth century. However, no definitive Dutch etymology for
4550-453: The term Hottentot specifically for what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned people referred to as Kaffirs . This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" or " Cape Coloureds " and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by the French anthropologist François Bernier . The idea that Hottentot referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples of southern Africa
4620-546: The term is known. A widely claimed etymology is from a supposed Dutch expression equivalent to "stammerer, stutterer", applied to the Khoikhoi on account of the distinctive click consonants in their languages . There is, however, no earlier attestation of a word hottentot to support this theory. An alternative possibility is that the name derived from an overheard term in chants accompanying Khoikhoi or San dances, but seventeenth-century transcriptions of such chants offer no conclusive evidence for this. An early Anglicisation of
4690-445: The term is recorded as hodmandod in the years around 1700. The reduced Afrikaans /Dutch form hotnot has also been borrowed into South African English as a derogatory term for black people, including Cape Coloureds . In seventeenth-century Dutch, Hottentot was at times used to denote all black people (synonymously with Kaffir , which was at times likewise used for Cape Coloureds and Khoisans), but at least some speakers used
4760-506: Was found to be an inaccurate label when true retroflex clicks were discovered, Bleek's terms are still considered normative today. Here are the terms used in some of the main references. The dental, lateral and bilabial clicks are rarely confused, but the palatal and alveolar clicks frequently have conflicting names in older literature, and non-standard terminology is fossilized in Unicode. However, since Ladefoged & Traill (1984) clarified
4830-625: Was parodied in Lord Chesterfield's Letters of 1737 as "a respectable Hottentot". In its ethnic sense, Hottentot had developed its connotations of savagery and primitivism by the seventeenth century; colonial depictions of the Hottentots (Khoikhoi) in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygia and elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian" and
4900-420: Was well embedded in colonial scholarly thought by the end of the eighteenth century. The main meaning of Hottentot as an ethnic term in the 19th and the 20th centuries has therefore been to denote the Khoikhoi people specifically. However, Hottentot also continued to be used through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in a wider sense, to include all of the people now usually referred to with
#569430