Talk:ǃXóõ

Is it an English word? Why? Maro

It's used in enough English texts without italics or quotation marks that it meets CFI as an English word. It seems to be about as common a name for the language as the diacritic-less name "Taa". (Neither is common, because people don't commonly talk about the language. When they do, they tend to be specialists who borrow spelling "ǃXóõ" wholesale.) We're definitely missing some pronunciations, though: highly knowledgeable linguists may call it [ǃxóŋ], but I'd guess the average person, if confronted with it, might pronounce it /zo/, /kso/ or /zu/, /ksu/. - -sche (discuss) 00:59, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Aha! I was fortunate enough to find a reference to the anglicised pronunciation. - -sche (discuss) 01:20, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Good. It's better than nothing. Maro 19:53, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Until it can be verified, I've removed this from the entry:

• (approximation of the ǃXóõ pronunciation) IPA^(key): [ǃxóŋ], [txóŋ]

I think the [t] should be [k], and I wonder about the [ó] (why not /o/?) and the [ŋ] (why?). - -sche (discuss) 01:39, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

The first one is probably a ǃXóõ pronunciation of ǃxóõ. The second one looks like an anglicised pronunciation, becasuse [t] (alveolar plosive) is the most similar (but actually is not so similar) sound to [ǃ] (alveolar click). But even this one change doesn't make it English, because there are no tones and no [x] sound in English. Maro 19:53, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I'd say [x] is phonemic in English: some dialects lack it, but others have it, and there are minimal pairs like loch IPA^(key): /lɔx/, /lɒx/ vs lock IPA^(key): /lɔk/, /lɒk/ / log IPA^(key): /lɔɡ/, /lɒɡ/. But that's a tangent. :b - -sche (discuss) 21:43, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Trivia

So many sounds of the ǃXóõ language are difficult to pronounce that speakers develop lumps on their larynges. When Anthony Traill lived among them and learnt their language to write his dictionary of it, he also developed such a lump. [1] - -sche (discuss) 05:48, 24 August 2012 (UTC)