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
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)