Click consonants, everything about them

[Thomas Winwood]

What resources are there on the origins and behaviours of click consonants which would be useful to conlangers? In particular, anything which can provide clarity to any part of this vague and unhelpful paragraph from Wikipedia would be delicious.

How [clicks] arose is not known, but it is generally assumed that they developed from sequences of non-click consonants, as they are found allophonically for doubly articulated consonants in West Africa (Ladefoged 1968), where /tk/ sequences overlap at word boundaries in German (Fuchs 2007), and for the sequence /mw/ in Ndau and Tonga. (Here the labial [m] may have assimilated to the velar place of the [w], as [m͡ŋw], with the release of the labial before the velar later generating a click [ᵐʘw].) Such developments have also been posited in historical reconstruction. For example, the Sandawe word for 'horn', /tɬana/, with a lateral affricate, may be a cognate with the root /ᵑǁaː/ found throughout the Khoe family, which has a lateral click. This and other words suggests that at least some Khoe clicks may have formed from consonant clusters when the first vowel of a word was lost; in this instance [tɬana] → [tɬna] → [ǁŋa] / [ᵑǁa].

I'd like to play around with clicks, but I feel that if I embed them in the protolanguage my use of them will end up being unrealistic.

[Cael]

to me it looks like CC click

[Click]

I had a conlang sketch where clicks arose from implosives and by cluster reduction, for example [ɓ mɓ ʔɓ] → [ʘ ŋʘ kʘ].

[Drydic]

What resources are there on the origins and behaviours of click consonants which would be useful to conlangers? In particular, anything which can provide clarity to any part of this vague and unhelpful paragraph from Wikipedia would be delicious.

How [clicks] arose is not known, but it is generally assumed that they developed from sequences of non-click consonants, as they are found allophonically for doubly articulated consonants in West Africa (Ladefoged 1968), where /tk/ sequences overlap at word boundaries in German (Fuchs 2007), and for the sequence /mw/ in Ndau and Tonga. (Here the labial [m] may have assimilated to the velar place of the [w], as [m͡ŋw], with the release of the labial before the velar later generating a click [ᵐʘw].) Such developments have also been posited in historical reconstruction. For example, the Sandawe word for 'horn', /tɬana/, with a lateral affricate, may be a cognate with the root /ᵑǁaː/ found throughout the Khoe family, which has a lateral click. This and other words suggests that at least some Khoe clicks may have formed from consonant clusters when the first vowel of a word was lost; in this instance [tɬana] → [tɬna] → [ǁŋa] / [ᵑǁa].

I'd like to play around with clicks, but I feel that if I embed them in the protolanguage my use of them will end up being unrealistic.

Here, I'll simplify it for you:

How clicks arose is not known.

There you go. Go hog-wild and have fun

The only thing to remember really is that clicks are in roots, I don't recall ever hearing of them showing up in an affix.

[Xephyr]

The most important thing really to remember about clicks is that they're just like regular phonemes-- specifically, stops (oral or nasal). So like if a language has a coronal stop series of /n d t tˁ/ it's likely to have a coronal click series along the lines of /n! g! k! k!ˁ/. Click languages are just found among African languages, which are ferociously CV, but if a language had clicks which allowed more complicated phonotactics it would probably treat them similarly to stops-- if you can say "sta" then you can say "sk!a", etc. Also labial clicks are uncommon, but you probably knew that.

(Oh and stay away from the uvularic aka linguo-pulmonic/linguo-glottal clicks. They're a mess.)