Features
Heine & Honken (2010) reconstruct six click families for Kx'a: the five that occur in the most conservative dialects of ǃKung, plus the bilabial clicks of ǂHoan. Bilabial clicks became dental in ǃXun; retroflex clicks became lateral in ǂHoan and northern ǃXun, alveolar in southern ǃXun, and remained retroflex only in central ǃXun. However, Starostin (2003) argues that the bilabial clicks are a secondary development in ǂHoan. He cites the ǂHoan words for 'one' and 'two', /ŋ͡ʘũ/ and /ʘoa/, where no other Khoisan language has a labial consonant of any kind in its words for these numerals. This would of course also be explained by their loss of labial articulation in ǃXun; Heine & Honken report they could find no way to avoid postulating a series of labial clicks for the protolanguage.
Read more about this topic: Kx'a Languages
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