Click letter

Various letters have been used to write the click consonants of southern Africa. The precursors of the current IPA letters were created by J. G. Krönlein, popularized by Karl Richard Lepsius, and continued by Wilhelm Bleek.

Also influential were Clement Doke and Douglas Beach, who used a different system that partially paralleled the IPA from 1921 to 1989.

Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or more strictly on the Latin alphabet. Clicks written with Latin letters such as c q x ç have case forms; when written with the Lepsius pipe letters ǀ ǃ ǁ ǂ they do not.

By the early 19th century, the otherwise unneeded letters c q x were used as the basis for writing clicks in Zulu by British and German missions. However, for general linguistics this was confusing, as each of these letters had other uses. There were various ad hoc attempts to create letters—often iconic symbols—for click consonants, with the most successful being that of Krönlein popularized by Lepsius. Doke later created a different system, based graphically on the IPA letters of 1921 and theoretically on an empirically informed conception of the nature of click consonants. The only other system that has seen wide use is Kirshenbaum, an ASCII substitute for the IPA, which has been used in transcribing Damin.

Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a pipe for Lepsius, modifications of Latin letters for Doke and Beach), there was a conceptual difference: Lepsius used one letter as the base for all click consonants of the same place of articulation (called the 'influx'), and added a second letter or diacritic for the manner of articulation (called the 'efflux'), treating them as two distinct sounds (the click proper and its accompaniment), whereas Doke used a separate letter for each tenuis, voiced, and nasal click, treating each as a distinct consonant, and thus following the example of the Latin alphabet, where the voiced and nasal occlusives also treated as distinct consonants (p b m, t d n, c j ñ, k g ŋ). Kirshenbaum differs from either in using a generic ⟨ǃ⟩ for all clicks, with a preceding letter to indicate both place and manner.

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