!χóõ is a Southern Khoisan language from Botswana.
Example from Ladefoged, Course in Phonetics. Transcriptions slightly simplified.
| bilabial | dental | alveolar | palatal | lateral |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S
ʘʔoo
|
S
ǀʔaa
|
S
!ʔaa
|
S
ǂʔaa
|
S
ǁʔaa
|
See L&M (pp. 246-259) for description (with diagrams) of how these basic places of articulation are actually realized in clicks, and for discussion of their acoustic properties.
See SoWL for more extensive examples from other languages (Nama, Zulu, Xhosa).
Click (of course!) here for demo of voice quality in !χóõ (with further click examples).
Notes on Sonagrams
In the sonagrams all the clicks appear very "pulse-like". This is partly because in all the examples given here the clicks ar accompanied by a glottal stop, giving a long period of silence between release of the click and onset of the following vowel. The glottal stop is not a necessary accompaniment to the click, but simply one of many possible accompainments (see L&M for extensive discussion and SoWL for examples).
In fact there are characteristic differences in the release phase of the clicks:
| palatal, alveolar: | more abrupt (more transient-like) |
| bilabial, dental, lateral: | less abrupt (more affricate-like) |
Characteristic spectral differences are:
| dental,palatal: | Main Energy concentration higher than 2.5 kHz |
| alveolar, lateral: | Main Energy concentration lower than 2.5 kHz |
| bilabial: | Wideband noise |