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The compound term Khoisan / Khoesān is a modern anthropological convention in use since the early-to-mid 20th century. Khoisan is a coinage by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera. [6] It entered wider usage from the 1960s based on the proposal of a "Khoisan" language family by Joseph Greenberg.
Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, linguists who study Khoisan languages reject their unity, and the name "Khoisan" is used by them as a term of convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as "Papuan" and "Australian" are.
The Tuu languages are one of the three traditional language families that make up the Khoisan languages. In 2011, there were around 2,500 speakers of Taa. Taa is the word for 'human being'; the local name of the language is Taa ǂaan (Tâa ǂâã), from ǂaan 'language'.
The ancestor of Tuu languages, Proto-Tuu, was presumably also spoken in or around the Kalahari desert, as a word for the gemsbok (*!hai) is reconstructable to Proto-Tuu. [1] There is evidence of substantial borrowing of words between Tuu languages and other Khoisan languages, including basic vocabulary.
Correspondingly, the word is "sometimes used as ugly slang for a black person". [19] Use of the derived term hotnot was explicitly proscribed in South Africa by 2008. [20] 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. [21]
Nǁng is the only Khoisan language known to have a strident front vowel, /e𐞴/, though this is rare, occurring in only two known words, zeqe /zḛ̰́é/ 'to fly' and ǂʻheqbe /ᵑ̊ǂḛ̰̀βé/ 'man's loincloth'. The lack of a nasalized equivalent is thought to be an accidental gap or simply unattested due to the small number of known words.
The accepted term for the two people being Khoisan. [2] The designation "Khoekhoe" is actually a kare or praise address, not an ethnic endonym, but it has been used in the literature as an ethnic term for Khoe -speaking peoples of Southern Africa, particularly pastoralist groups, such as the Griqua , Gona, Nama , Khoemana and Damara nations.
ǃKung constituted one of the branches of the putative Khoisan language family, and was called Northern Khoisan in that scenario, but the unity of Khoisan has never been demonstrated and is now regarded as spurious. Nonetheless, the anthropological term "Khoisan" has been retained as an umbrella term for click languages in general.