Click letter

A Nama man giving a literacy lesson in Khoekhoegowab that includes click letters

Various letters have been used to write the click consonants of southern Africa. The precursors of the current IPA letters, ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩, were created by Karl Richard Lepsius[1][2] and used by Wilhelm Bleek[3] and Lucy Lloyd, who added ⟨ʘ⟩. Also influential were Daniel Jones, who created the letters ⟨ʇ⟩ ⟨ʖ⟩ ⟨ʗ⟩ ⟨ʞ⟩ that were promoted by the IPA from 1921 to 1989, and were used by Clement Doke[4][5] and Douglas Beach.[6]

Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or on the Latin alphabet. They may change over time or between countries. Latin letters, such as ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ ⟨ç⟩, have case forms; the pipe letters ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩ do not.[7]

  1. ^ Lepsius, C. R. (1855). Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet: Grundsätze der Übertragung fremder Schriftsysteme und bisher noch ungeschriebener Sprachen in europäische Buchstaben. Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz.
  2. ^ Lepsius, C. R. (1863). Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters (2nd ed.). London/Berlin.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. ^ Bleek, Wilhelm. A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages. Vol. (1862: Part I, 1869: Part II). London: Trübner & Co.
  4. ^ Doke, Clement M. (1925). "An outline of the phonetics of the language of the ʗhũ̬꞉ Bushman of the North-West Kalahari". Bantu Studies. 2: 129–166. doi:10.1080/02561751.1923.9676181.
  5. ^ Doke, Clement M. (1969) [1926]. The phonetics of the Zulu language. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.
  6. ^ Beach, Douglas Martyn (1938). The phonetics of the Hottentot language. London: W. Heffer & Sons.
  7. ^ The original Lepsius pipe letters actually did have case forms. For example, Lepsius (1855, p. 49) wrote Amaxhosa and Xhosa as Amaııósa and 𝖨𝖨ósa.

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