Clicks in Berber

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Raholeun
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Clicks in Berber

Post by Raholeun »

Dear fellow conlangers,

Yesterday I was commuting back from work on the bus. Right next to me was a couple, husband and wife so I expect, Maghrebi-looking. They were having a heated argument on which I tried to eavesdrop. There were the odd French words here and there which I could make out, but the oddest thing of it all were that both of them used a variety of clicks. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with clicks so there's no way to give a correct (IPA) transcription of the sounds. There were however some of the "smacking" clicks and a whole lot of "ksst"-clicks; the one with which you try to engage a cat.

I am confident the language they were speaking was not Arabic, as it would have sounded familiar. I am guessing they spoke a variety of Berber. Is there a Berber language which has clicks, either phonetically or paralinguistically maybe?
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Frislander »

Where do you live? A location would help to put context to this.
Raholeun wrote:Yesterday I was commuting back from work on the bus. Right next to me was a couple, husband and wife so I expect, Maghrebi-looking. They were having a heated argument on which I tried to eavesdrop. There were the odd French words here and there which I could make out, but the oddest thing of it all were that both of them used a variety of clicks. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with clicks so there's no way to give a correct (IPA) transcription of the sounds. There were however some of the "smacking" clicks and a whole lot of "ksst"-clicks; the one with which you try to engage a cat.
Well the first click is likely a bilabial, possibly labialised (so /ʘʷ/), while I guess the second one may be dental /ǀ/ (the "engage a cat" description doesn't help though, because I engage cats by pursing my lips and sucking air in through a small arpeture).
I am confident the language they were speaking was not Arabic, as it would have sounded familiar. I am guessing they spoke a variety of Berber. Is there a Berber language which has clicks, either phonetically or paralinguistically maybe?
Certainly not phonemically: phonemic clicks are basically restricted to the Southern tip of Africa and a couple of isolates in the East, nowhere near the Berber area. I'm guessing they must have been paralinguistic.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by opipik »

Woah this is a clickbait.

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Raholeun »

Frislander wrote:Where do you live? A location would help to put context to this.
This was in Brussels. Naturally, there's quite some native speakers Berber varieties living in the city.
Frislander wrote:Well the first click is likely a bilabial, possibly labialised (so /ʘʷ/), while I guess the second one may be dental /ǀ/ (the "engage a cat" description doesn't help though, because I engage cats by pursing my lips and sucking air in through a small arpeture).
How wrong I was in supposing everybody lures cats with palatal clicks.
Frislander wrote:Certainly not phonemically: phonemic clicks are basically restricted to the Southern tip of Africa and a couple of isolates in the East, nowhere near the Berber area. I'm guessing they must have been paralinguistic.
You are most probably correct. Although it gets you wondering why these two people interlaced their conversations with these clicks, what were they trying to express by them? They seemed to be having some marital issues, otherwise I'd have gone up and asked them what language they spoke.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Frislander »

Raholeun wrote:
Frislander wrote:Certainly not phonemically: phonemic clicks are basically restricted to the Southern tip of Africa and a couple of isolates in the East, nowhere near the Berber area. I'm guessing they must have been paralinguistic.
You are most probably correct. Although it gets you wondering why these two people interlaced their conversations with these clicks, what were they trying to express by them?
There's a whole WALS Chapter on the subject if you want to do a bit of reading on that.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Arzena »

Having lived in Morocco (Fes-Meknes province) and heard Tamazight spoken on a frequent basis, I heard words that sounded like they had clicks on the first listen, which, on closer inspection, are heavy consonant clusters. The most prominent example I can remember is ksksu [ks.ksu] 'couscous' sounding as though it could have a sneaky click in there.
How wrong I was in supposing everybody lures cats with palatal clicks.
In Morocco the bilabial click is how people attract cats. Even the cats know this! I remember them ignoring my palatal clicks until I switched to bilabial ones.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Vijay »

Arzena wrote:Having lived in Morocco (Fes-Meknes province) and heard Tamazight spoken on a frequent basis, I heard words that sounded like they had clicks on the first listen, which, on closer inspection, are heavy consonant clusters.
Given that it's Berber languages we're talking about, that's exactly what I suspected these "clicks" might be, too.

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by garysk »

This is totally off-topic, but I can't not comment...
opipik wrote:Woah this is a clickbait.
The word you are trying to use there is "Whoa" /(h)wō/ as one would say to a horse in English to get it to stop.

Tumblr uses this mangled form "woah" /wō'a/ in many of the "have you seen so-and-so's post" messages they send out, but despite their trendy ignorance, the word is "whoa"!

PS: I wondered why opipik accused the thread of being clickbait, but then I re-noticed the topic. Doh! /dōh/
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by GamerGeek »

garysk wrote:This is totally off-topic, but I can't not comment...
opipik wrote:Woah this is a clickbait.
The word you are trying to use there is "Whoa" /(h)wō/ as one would say to a horse in English to get it to stop.

Tumblr uses this mangled form "woah" /wō'a/ in many of the "have you seen so-and-so's post" messages they send out, but despite their trendy ignorance, the word is "whoa"!
Both look wierd.
PS: I wondered why opipik accused the thread of being clickbait, but then I re-noticed the topic. Doh! /dōh/
You mean doah? or dhoa?

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by garysk »

While it may look weird, "whoa" is the standard spelling.

"Woah" doesn't allow for the "wh" sound which in my dialect is still pronounced as an unvoiced /ʍ/. Merriam-Webster's audio rendition is /ʍóò/ (rising then falling tone and two distinct (to my ear) ō's)

And I did mean /dōh/. Though Homer (the Simpson, not the Greek) says /dōʔ/ or maybe even /dʰōʔ/. Homer (the Greek) may have said something like δω.

I am reminded of a feature of my brother's speech: pronouncing weapon as "wheapon". And I have heard others make the same error.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

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garysk wrote:This is totally off-topic, but I can't not comment...
opipik wrote:Woah this is a clickbait.
The word you are trying to use there is "Whoa" /(h)wō/ as one would say to a horse in English to get it to stop.

Tumblr uses this mangled form "woah" /wō'a/ in many of the "have you seen so-and-so's post" messages they send out, but despite their trendy ignorance, the word is "whoa"!

PS: I wondered why opipik accused the thread of being clickbait, but then I re-noticed the topic. Doh! /dōh/
The horse-related meaning has always been secondary for this exclamation, and the spelling "woah" is at least two decades older than tumblr (the 15 minutes or so I spent looking for it show attestations from as far back as the 80s in published works--who knows how old it is in casual written communication). Horses and tumblr are barely relevant to the issue of whether opipik is ""exclaiming correctly"".

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by garysk »

The horse-related meaning has always been secondary
What other use does this word have? Merriam-Webster appears to disagree with you.

The command, whether issued to horse or human, means "stop moving".

Regardless of prior (mis-)use, "woah" does not spell /ʍō/. (I was going to say "irregardless" as an example of misuse that has persisted for generations)
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by ---- »

Surprise, getting someone's attention, calming someone, etc. Telling a person to stop moving is not horse-related. I don't see how you can just assert a priori that woah "doesn't spell" anything if there are in fact people who connect the orthographic representation "woah" with a phonological representation in their minds, and there are.

When I want to know whether a word is attested and in what way it is attested, I don't go searching in dictionaries, I go searching in the available corpora for the relevant language. This is a more reliable way of answering the question of attestation because we don't have to ask questions like "what are the motivations for the editors of this dictionary including any given word?" The answer to the question of motivation in the case of a generic corpus is likely to be that the person just wanted to use it. Anyway, when I did consult the available data, I found many, many examples of "woah", none of which had anything to do with horses or were located on tumblr.

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by KathTheDragon »

thetha wrote:Surprise, getting someone's attention, calming someone, etc. Telling a person to stop moving is not horse-related.
It isn't anymore but that's semantic drift for you. The word originated as a command to stop a horse, and from there generalised to include people, and then further to all the other senses it now has.

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Re: Clicks in Berber

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Arzena wrote:Having lived in Morocco (Fes-Meknes province) and heard Tamazight spoken on a frequent basis
First off, that's pretty cool. Did you have a chance to study the language in more detail?
Arzena wrote:I heard words that sounded like they had clicks on the first listen, which, on closer inspection, are heavy consonant clusters. The most prominent example I can remember is ksksu [ks.ksu] 'couscous' sounding as though it could have a sneaky click in there.
Is it common for languages with extensive consonant clusters to have clicks as allophonic variation? Would you know of any areas apart from sub-Sahara Africa where you would see (hear) this?
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by garysk »

Thanks, @KathTheDragon.

Whoa means "stop", whether applied to a horse, an impetuous person, or any process that is ongoing. Its use as an exclamation, however (mis)spelled, has drifted, as Kath says, a little from the original meaning. "Whoa you gotta be kidding" usage is still within the envelope of meaning, "stop" (i.e., "stop kidding me"). It may be used widely without reference to horses, but that does not make such colloquial uses "primary"; its first (primary) use is/was with horses.

Sorry, I don't have the resources, nor the inclination, to "search the corpus" (wherein one will likely find all sorts of erroneous usages); frequency of error does not reverse the error. I thought the dictionary was an acceptable standard resource.

Sorry for being pedantic by insisting on the correct spelling. Obviously I was unaware that "woah" is a common misspelling, having only run across it in Tumblr.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Aili Meilani »

Holy prescriptivism, Batman!
garysk wrote:I thought the dictionary was an acceptable standard resource.
It's not. Languages don't work the way you think they do.

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by garysk »

Spelling (orthography) is necessarily prescriptive. Woah may spell a word, but it doesn't spell whoa.

Dictionaries are intended to be standard resources. Some are more prescriptive than others, but the very act of entering a word in a dictionary implies usages. And most people only have access to one or two of them (outside the web), hence they are a normal, standard resource. What is your alternative to a dictionary?

And how do YOU know how *I* think languages work?
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by ---- »

KathTheDragon wrote:
thetha wrote:Surprise, getting someone's attention, calming someone, etc. Telling a person to stop moving is not horse-related.
It isn't anymore but that's semantic drift for you. The word originated as a command to stop a horse, and from there generalised to include people, and then further to all the other senses it now has.
No, that's not true. The horse-related meaning arose from a merger of whoa with a different exclamation, 'ho'. But 'whoa' is attested before this meaning was ever used.

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Travis B. »

Just because a dictionary says something does not make it true garysk; and just because a dictionary does not say something does not make it false. Actual usage has little to do with what dictionaries say, and it is actual usage that matters.

Likewise, spelling only really became prescriptive a few centuries ago at most. And there is still informal spelling outside of that used in literary language, which persists to this very day.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Frislander »

garysk wrote:Some are more prescriptive than others, but the very act of entering a word in a dictionary implies usages.
This is only partly true, and doesn't work at all the other way: some words in a dictionary may fall out of use/only be used in very specific scholarly contexts, while there are definitely many words out there
And most people only have access to one or two of them (outside the web), hence they are a normal, standard resource.
What is this logic, or lack thereof? "People have almost no choice as to what dictionary they use therefore they are a standard resource" is nonsense.
What is your alternative to a dictionary?
Corpus-analysis using a large range of texts from the past centuries looking for examples of the word and sorting them into its different contexts, the sort of thing you get on Language Log from time-to-time.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by garysk »

while there are definitely many words out there
Gosh, I am overwhelmed by your precision, depth, and logic.
What is this logic, or lack thereof? "People have almost no choice as to what dictionary they use therefore they are a standard resource" is nonsense.
If your are going to quote me, QUOTE me, don't reword it to suit your ends, and especially don't reword it to provide a basis for attack.

Listen: Most people (not most people here on this board) have no interest in searching corpora, they lack the knowledge and time to indulge in such scholarly pursuits, and when language questions come up, typically they go to the STANDARD REFERENCE for language, The Dictionary. "The Dictionary" masks the fact that there are many different dictionaries, some printed some not, with varying degrees of "quality" and "completeness", and designed for a variety of purposes, but for the lay person, the dictionary at hand is The Dictionary.

I am a member of "most people" in this regard; I do not search corpora. I use a (usually online these days) dictionary. If that makes me a stain on the bottom of your foot, then don't tread on me. I have no means or desire to control my stainedness for your protection.

I did what a reasonable lay person would do: I went to the Dictionary and looked up the spelling of "whoa", which isn't "woah", despite apparently a lot of use of the latter. Prescriptivist? Isn't "spelling" inherently prescriptive? Are we not all judged by many others based on our adherence to the Standards of Spelling and Grammar of your choice? Try getting a job that requires "literacy" (however defined) using slang and non-standard English, and you will find yourself subjected to many such judgments.

Using nonstandard language of course is fine in appropriate contexts. Being unaware that "woah" had any legitimacy and wasn't just a typo, I offered a correction, and since this forum is peopled by folks of education, I thought that referencing the standard language was appropriate.

Please, I'm tired of being berated for not casting a wide enough net on the spelling of "whoa", and for advocating for the Standard Language in its appropriate contexts. Can we just return this topic to Berber clickbait?
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Travis B. »

What matters is usage in a given context - take formal literary English, I would use somewhat and should not have, whereas when writing more informally but still using standard orthography I would use kind of and shouldn't've, whereas when writing purely informally I would use kinda and shouldna. (Note the the difference between the first and the second two are actual lexical and syntactic differences, whereas the difference between the second and the third are purely differences between informal usage as rendered in standard orthography and informal usage as rendered in informal orthography.) A dictionary provides a one-size-fits-all solution aimed primarily at the formal literary language, largely ignoring or deprecating more informal usages despite that these have their own rules even if they might not be written down anywhere. And people typically don't need to look up such things in a dictionary; if they are used in the variety they normally speak, they will know them already and will not need to look them up, and if they are not, they won't use them in the first place.
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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Nooj »

Currently reaiding in a small village in se morocco. Most residents are berber speakers. Other speaker has talked about tamazight in central morocco but here they speak varieties of tachel7it. In marakech i also am learning it. No clicks in the language but in moroccan culture clicks are used for a variety of paralinguistic purposes as other people said. This ia probably it.

Btw what does a typical maghrebi person look like to you

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Re: Clicks in Berber

Post by Arzena »

Raholeun wrote:First off, that's pretty cool. Did you have a chance to study the language in more detail?
I studied Tamazight and Tashalhit from the staff at my language center. Most were Tashalhit speakers and my 'courses' consisted of me asking for the names of things and verbs outside of my Arabic courses.
Is it common for languages with extensive consonant clusters to have clicks as allophonic variation? Would you know of any areas apart from sub-Sahara Africa where you would see (hear) this?
I would say no. First off, clicks seems to be an areal feature of southern Africa. Second, languages with extensive consonant clusters tend to simplify the clusters. For example, in recordings of the Bible in languages of the Pacific Northwest, I have heard more schwas than were written in the accompanying text.
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