Dental Clicks
Dental (or more precisely denti-alveolar) clicks are a family of click consonants found, as constituents of words, only in Africa and in the Damin ritual jargon of Australia. The tut-tut! (British spelling) or tsk! tsk! (American spelling) sound used to express disapproval or pity is a dental click, although it isn't a speech sound in that context.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the place of articulation of these sounds is ⟨ǀ⟩, a pipe. Prior to 1989, ⟨ʇ⟩ was the IPA letter for the dental clicks. It is still occasionally used where the symbol ⟨ǀ⟩ would be confounded with other symbols, such as prosody marks, or simply because in many fonts the pipe is indistinguishable from an el or capital i. Either letter may be combined with a second letter to indicate the manner of articulation, though this is commonly omitted for tenuis clicks, and increasingly a diacritic is used instead. Common dental clicks are:
| IPA I | IPA II | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ʇ⟩ | tenuis dental click | |
| ⟨ǀʰ⟩ ⟨ʇʰ⟩ | aspirated dental click | |
| ⟨ǀ̬⟩ ⟨ʇ̬⟩ | ⟨ᶢǀ⟩ ⟨ᶢʇ⟩ | voiced dental click |
| ⟨ǀ̃⟩ ⟨ʇ̃⟩ | ⟨ᵑǀ⟩ ⟨ᵑʇ⟩ | dental nasal click |
| ⟨ǀ̥̃ʰ⟩ ⟨ʇ̥̃ʰ⟩ | ⟨ᵑ̊ǀʰ⟩ ⟨ᵑ̊ʇʰ⟩ | aspirated dental nasal click |
| ⟨ǀ̃ˀ⟩ ⟨ʇ̃ˀ⟩ | ⟨ᵑǀˀ⟩ ⟨ᵑʇˀ⟩ | glottalized dental nasal click |
The last is what is heard in the sound sample at right, as non-native speakers tend to glottalize clicks to avoid nasalizing them.
In the orthographies of individual languages, the letters and digraphs for dental clicks may be based on either the pipe symbol of the IPA, ⟨ǀ⟩, or on the Latin ⟨c⟩ of Bantu convention. Nama and most Saan languages use the former; Naro, Sandawe, and Zulu use the latter.
Read more about Dental Clicks: Features, Occurrence
Famous quotes containing the word dental:
“[T]hose wholemeal breads ... look hand-thrown, like studio pottery, and are fine if you have all your teeth. But if not, then not. Perhaps the rise ... of the ... factory-made loaf, which may easily be mumbled to a pap betweeen gums, reflects the sorry state of the nation’s dental health.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)