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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 easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with ǀ . These are sharp (high-pitched) squeaky sounds made by sucking on the ...
Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a pipe for Lepsius, modifications of Latin letters for Jones), there was a conceptual difference between them and Doke or Beach: Lepsius used one letter as the base for all click consonants of the same place of articulation (called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for ...
Traditionally, contour clicks were believed to be uvular in their rear articulation, whereas non-contour clicks were thought to be velar.However, it is now known that all clicks are uvular, at least in the languages which have been investigated, and that the articulation of these clicks is more complex than that of others but no different in location.
The alveolar or postalveolar clicks are a family of click consonants found only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. The tongue is more or less concave (depending on the language), and is pulled down rather than back as in the palatal clicks , making a hollower sound than those consonants.
Taa, for example, has 164 known consonants, including 111 (and potentially 115) clicks, an extraordinary number considering that the largest inventory of any language without clicks, that of Ubykh, is 80 (84 consonants including loanwords). With a cluster analysis, the number of clicks in Taa is reduced to 43, and the total number of consonants ...
The less common clicks, such as are found in Taa, are not included. Simple clicks. bilabial clicks [ʘ] either velar: voiceless bilabial click [ᵏʘ] voiced bilabial click [ᶢʘ] bilabial nasal click [ᵑʘ] or uvular: [𐞥ʘ], [𐞒ʘ], [ᶰʘ] dental clicks [ǀ] (= ʇ ) either velar: voiceless dental click [ᵏǀ] voiced dental click [ᶢǀ]
The following are the non-pulmonic consonants.They are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).
The bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants that sound like a smack of the lips. They are found as phonemes only in the small Tuu language family (currently two languages, one down to its last speaker), in the ǂ’Amkoe language of Botswana (also moribund), and in the extinct Damin ritual jargon of Australia.