Taa language - WikiHQ

Taa ( ), also known as ǃXóõ ( ; , of which this latter name may also be spelled ǃKhong or ǃXoon), and formerly called by the dialect name ǂHoan (also known as Western ǂHoan, to distinguish from Eastern ǂHoan), is a Tuu language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world. It is also notable for having perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants, with one count finding that 82% of basic vocabulary items started with a click. Most speakers live in Botswana, but a few hundred live in Namibia. The people call themselves ǃXoon (pl. ǃXooŋake) or ʼNǀohan (pl. Nǀumde), corresponding to the dialect they speak. In 2011, there were around 2,500 speakers of Taa.

is the word for 'human being'; the local name of the language is , from 'language'. (ǃXóõ) is an ethnonym used at opposite ends of the Taa-speaking area, but not by Taa speakers in between. Most living Taa speakers are ethnic ǃXoon or ʼNǀohan.

Taa shares a number of characteristic features with West ǂʼAmkoe and Gǀui, which together are considered part of the Kalahari Basin sprachbund.

Classification

Until the rediscovery of a few elderly speakers of Nǁng in the 1990s, Taa was thought to be the last surviving member of the Tuu language family. The Tuu languages are one of the three language families that make up the typological group of Khoisan languages.

Dialects

right|thumb|A Namibian woman, speaking in Taa, talks about how the girl's initiation ceremony was performed in the past.

There is sufficient dialectal variation in Taa that it might be better described as a dialect continuum than a single language. Taa dialects fall into two groups, suggesting a historical spread from west to east:

Taa dialects
West Taa: Anthony Traill's West ǃXoon and Dorothea Bleek's Nǀuǁʼen
East Taa
ǃAma (Western)
(Eastern)
East ǃXoon (Lone Tree)
Tsaasi–ǂHuan
Tsaasi
ǂHuan

Traill worked primarily with East ǃXoon, and the DoBeS project is working with ʼNǀohan (in East Taa) and West ǃXoon.

Alternate names

The various dialects and social groups of the Taa, their many names, the unreliability of transcriptions found in the literature, and the fact that names may be shared between languages and that dialects have been classified, has resulted in a great deal of confusion. Traill (1974), for example, spent two chapters of his Compleat Guide to the Koon [sic] disentangling names and dialects.

The name ǃXoon (more precisely ǃXóõ) is only used at Aminius Reserve in Namibia, around Lone Tree where Traill primarily worked, and at Dzutshwa (Botswana). It is, however, used by the ǃXoon for all Taa speakers. It has been variously spelled ǃxō, ǃkɔ̃ː, ǃko/ǃkõ, Khong, and the fully anglicized Koon.

Bleek's Nǀuǁʼen dialect has been spelled ǀNuǁen, ǀNuǁe꞉n, Ngǀuǁen, Nguen, Nǀhuǁéi, ŋǀuǁẽin, ŋǀuǁẽi, ŋǀuǁen, ǀuǁen. It has also been called by the ambiguous Khoekhoe term Nǀusan (Nǀu-san, Nǀūsā, Nǀuusaa, Nǀhusi), sometimes rendered Nusan or Noosan, which has been used for other languages in the area. A subgroup was known as Koon . This dialect is apparently extinct.

Westphal studied ǂHuan (ǂhũa) dialect (or ǂHũa-ʘwani), and used this name for the entire language. However, the term is ambiguous between Taa (Western ǂHũa) and ǂʼAmkoe (Eastern ǂHũa), and for this reason Traill chose to call the language ǃXóõ.

Tsaasi dialect is quite similar to ǂHuan, and like ǂHuan, the name is used ambiguously for a dialect of ǂʼAmkoe. This is a Tswana name, variously rendered Tshasi, Tshase, Tʃase, Tsase, Sasi, and Sase.

The Tswana term for Bushmen, Masarwa, is frequently encountered. More specific to the Taa are Magon (Magong) and the Tshasi mentioned above.

The Taa distinguish themselves along at least some of the groups above. Like many San peoples, they also distinguish themselves by the environment they live in (plain people, river people, etc.), and also by direction. Traill reports the following:

Tones

Anthony Traill describes four tones for the East ǃXoon dialect: high , mid , low , and mid-falling . Patterns for bisyllabic bases include high-high, mid-mid, mid-mid-falling, and low-low. DoBeS describes only two tonemes, high and low, for the West ǃXoon dialect. By analyzing each base as bimoraic, Traill's four tones are mapped onto [áá], [àá], [àà], and [áà]. Unlike Traill, Naumann does not find a four-way contrast on monomoraic grammatical forms in Eastern ǃXoon data.

In addition to lexical tone, Traill describes East ǃXoon nouns as falling into two tone classes according to the melody induced on concordial morphemes and transitive verbs: either level (Tone Class I) or falling (Tone Class II). Transitive object nouns from Tone Class I trigger mid/mid-rising tone in transitive verbs, while Tone Class 2 objects correlate with any tone contour. Naumann finds the same results in the eastern ʼNǀohan dialect.

! colspan=2|

! Labial

! Dental

! Alveolar

! Palatal

! Velar

! Uvular

! Glottal

! rowspan=9 | Plosive/ Affricate

! voiced

| || || || () || || [] ||

! tenuis

| () || || || || || ||

! voiceless aspirated

| () || || || || || ||

! prevoiced aspirated

| || || || || () || () [] ||

! velarized

| () || || || || || ||

! prevoiced velarized

| || || || || || ||

! voiceless ejective

| || () || || || () || () ||

! ejective cluster

| () || || || || || ||

! prevoiced ejective

| || || || || || ||

! colspan="2" | Fricative

| () || || || || || || ()

! rowspan=2 | Nasal || voiced

| || || || -- || - || ||

! glottalized

| || || || || || ||

! colspan=2 | Other

| -- || || -- || -- || || ||

Consonants in parentheses are rare.

The nasal only occurs between vowels, and only word finally (and then only in some dialects, for what are nasal vowels elsewhere), so these may be allophones. also only occur in medial position, except that the last is an allophone of rare initial . and (not in the table) occur in loans, mostly English.

Taa is typologically unusual in having mixed-voice ejectives. Juǀʼhoansi, which is part of the same sprachbund as Taa, has mixed voicing in .

Taa may have as few as 83 click sounds, if the more complex clicks are analyzed as clusters. Given the intricate clusters posited seen in the non-click consonants, it is not surprising that many of the Taa clicks should be analyzed as clusters. However, there is some debate whether these are actually clusters; all non-Khoisan languages in the world that have clusters allow clusters with sonorants like r, l, w, j (as in English tree, sleep, quick, cue), and this does not occur in Taa.

There are five click articulations: bilabial, dental, lateral, alveolar, and palatal. There are nineteen series, differing in phonation, manner, and complexity (see airstream contour). These are perfectly normal consonants in Taa, and indeed are preferred over non-clicks in word-initial position.

{| class="wikitable"

|+ East ǃXoon dialect: Click consonants (Traill 2018)

! bilabial || dental || lateral|| alveolar || palatal

| || || || || || Weak tenuis release || ||

| || || || || || Voiced velar throughout the hold of the click || ||

| || || || || || Released as a tenuis uvular stop that is delayed considerably beyond the release of the click || ||

| || || || || || Prenasalized , with a voiced uvular release || ||

<!--|-

| || || || || || Aspirated velar release || ?* ||

-->

| || || || || || Voiced lead with delayed aspiration (phonemically voiced lead with simple aspiration) || ||

| || || || || || Cineradiography shows that the articulation is indeed uvular || ?* ||

| || () || () || () || () || "Prenasalization with a uvular nasal and a brief uvular stop before the click, which is followed by an aspirated uvular stop" || ||

| || || || || || Voiceless velar affricate release, considerably fricative || ||

| || || || || || Voiced lead which ceases before the release of the click, like . In some dialects, voiced throughout: . || ||

| || || || || || Released into or , depending on dialect || ||

| || || || || || Voiced lead, or release || ||

| || || || || || Silent release, followed after some delay by the release of a glottal stop || ||

<!--|-

| || || || || || Released as an unaffricated velar ejective || rowspan=2| * ||

-->

| || || || || || Released as an unaffricated uvular ejective ||

| || || || || || Voiceless nasal airflow throughout the hold of the click || ||

| || || || || || Voiced velar nasal airflow throughout the hold of the click || ||

| || || || || || Preglottalized nasal , "best described as a click superimposed on the sequence ... the release of the click is immediately after a brief period of " || ||

| || || || || || Delayed aspiration: inaudible release followed by crescendo aspiration. || ||

The DoBeS project takes Traill's cluster analysis to mean that only the twenty tenuis, voiced, nasal, and voiceless nasal clicks are basic, with the rest being clusters of the tenuis and voiced clicks with and either or . Work on Taa's sister language Nǁng suggests that all clicks in both languages have a uvular or rear articulation, and that the clicks considered to be uvular here are actually lingual–pulmonic and lingual–glottalic airstream contours. It may be that the 'prevoiced' consonants of Taa, including prevoiced clicks, can also be analyzed as contour consonants, in this case with voicing contours.

<nowiki>*</nowiki> DoBeS only matches 17 series to Traill, as the – and – distinctions he discovered had not yet been published. DoBeS and , respectively, correspond to the former pair, while and (presumably in that order, as uvular clicks tend to have a delayed release) correspond to the latter pair.

Traill's account of East ǃXoon leaves for voiceless series of clicks without equivalents with a voiced lead. The DoBeS account of West ǃXoon, which uses voicing for morphological derivation to a greater extent than East ǃXoon does, has four additional series, written nꞰʼʼ, gꞰʼ, gꞰqʼ and nꞰhh in their practical orthography. The first three match the unpaired glottalized series of Traill, (= ), , . If Traill's series is the voiced equivalent of plain aspirated , rather than delayed aspirated, that would leave the DobeS nꞰhh series as voiced delayed aspiration.

All nasal clicks have twin airstreams, since the air passing through the nose bypasses the tongue. Usually this is pulmonic egressive. However, the series in Taa is characterized by pulmonic ingressive nasal airflow. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:268) state that "This ǃXóõ click is probably unique among the sounds of the world's languages that, even in the middle of a sentence, it may have ingressive pulmonic airflow." Taa is the only language known to contrast voiceless nasal and voiceless nasal aspirated (i.e. delayed aspirated) clicks (Miller 2011).

West ǃXoon (DoBeS)

In a strict unit analysis, West ǃXoon has Under a cluster analysis this is reduced to 88 consonants, 43 of which are clicks in 9 series. The table below follows the cluster analysis.

These are written in the practical orthography (Naumann 2008). Marginal consonants are not marked as such.

{| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center

|+ West ǃXoon dialect (DoBeS): Consonants

ǂʔûã
ǂnûm
ǁâe

Phrases

The phrases from Eastern ǃXóõ were compiled by Anthony Traill:

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

External links

DoBeS Taa language project
UCLA Archive for ǃXóõ, includes story and language sound files
Taa basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database