Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!uunet!world!dbucher
From: dbucher@world.std.com (Daniel B Bucher)
Subject: Re: Help, I can't click!
Message-ID: <D631Iv.JA@world.std.com>
Keywords: Xhosa, click, Makeba
Organization: Massachusetts Bay Mesopotamia
References: <rharmsen.372.0012DBD5@knoware.nl>
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 1995 04:52:01 GMT
Lines: 23

In article <rharmsen.372.0012DBD5@knoware.nl>,
Ruud Harmsen <rharmsen@knoware.nl> wrote:
>I can make some of the more exotic sounds found in languages
>of the world, but the African clicks I have never mastered.
>I know that for clicks the breath flows inwards instead of outward,
>but when do you switch from one to the other? If there's a vowel
>after the click, is it said also with the air flowing in?
>Like in Xhosa, which I think starts with a click, does the air
>return to an outward flow with the s, or already before that?
>Do the lungs generate the inward flow, or cavities in the mouth
>or throat?

Clicks are not made with the lungs, at least not the part which you 
would identify as "clicky" (sometimes they are voiced, which is 
done with the lungs). The click is made by creating suction between
the roof of the mouth and the tongue, then breaking the seal -- like
pulling a suction cup off a surface. There are three different click
articulation places --  alveodental, palatal, and velar I believe.
And as I mentioned before, they can be voiced, which would occur
simultaneously (during, in parallel, "in the background") with 
the articulation.


