Taa language


Taa, also known as ǃXóõ is a Tuu language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world. It is also notable for having perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants, with one count finding that 82% of basic vocabulary items started with a click. Most speakers live in Botswana, but a few hundred live in Namibia. The people call themselves ǃXoon or ʼNǀohan, depending on the dialect they speak. The Tuu languages are one of the three traditional language families that make up the Khoisan languages.
Taa is the word for 'human being'; the local name of the language is Taa ǂaan, from ǂaan 'language'. ǃXoon is an ethnonym used at opposite ends of the Taa-speaking area, but not by Taa speakers in between. Most living Taa speakers are ethnic ǃXoon or 'Nǀohan.
Taa shares a number of characteristic features with West ǂʼAmkoe and Gǀui, which together are considered part of the Kalahari Basin sprachbund.

Classification

Until the rediscovery of a few elderly speakers of Nǁng in the 1990s, Taa was thought to be the last surviving member of the Tuu language family.

Dialects

There is sufficient dialectal variation in Taa that it might be better described as a dialect continuum than as a single language. Taa dialects fall into two groups, suggesting a historical spread from west to east:
Traill worked primarily with East ǃXoon, and the DoBeS project is working with ʼNǀohan and West ǃXoon.
ǀʼAuni and Kiǀhazi, previously considered dialects of Taa, were more divergent than the dialects here, and are now classified as a distinct language, Lower Nossob.

Alternate names

The various dialects and social groups of the Taa, their many names, the unreliability of transcriptions found in the literature, and the fact that names may be shared between languages and that dialects have been classified, has resulted in a great deal of confusion. Traill, for example, spent two chapters of his Compleat Guide to the Koon disentangling names and dialects.
The name ǃXoon is only used at Aminius Reserve in Namibia, around Lone Tree where Traill primarily worked, and at Dzutshwa. It is, however, used by the ǃXoon for all Taa speakers. It has been variously spelled ǃxō, ǃkɔ̃ː, ǃko/ǃkõ, Khong, and the fully anglicized Koon.
Bleek's Nǀuǁʼen dialect has been spelled ǀNuǁen, ǀNuǁe꞉n, Ngǀuǁen, Nguen, Nǀhuǁéi, ŋǀuǁẽin, ŋǀuǁẽi, ŋǀuǁen, ǀuǁen. It has also been called by the ambiguous Khoekhoe term Nǀusan, sometimes rendered Nusan or Noosan, which has been used for other languages in the area. A subgroup was known as Koon. This dialect is apparently extinct.
Bleek recorded another now-extinct variety at the town of Khakhea, and it is known in the literature as Kakia. Names with a tee: Katia, Kattea, Khatia, and Xatia, are apparently spelling variants of Kakia, though this is not certain. Vaalpens, ǀKusi, and ǀEikusi evidently refer to the same variety as Xatia.
Westphal studied a variety rendered ǀŋamani, ǀnamani, Ngǀamani, ǀŋamasa. This dialect is apparently also now extinct.
Westphal also studied ǂHuan dialect, and used this name for the entire language. However, the term is ambiguous between Taa and ǂʼAmkoe, and for this reason Traill chose to call the language ǃXóõ.
Tsaasi dialect is quite similar to ǂHuan, and like ǂHuan, the name is used ambiguously for a dialect of ǂʼAmkoe. This is a Tswana name, variously rendered Tshasi, Tshase, Tʃase, Tsase, Sasi, and Sase.
The Tswana term for Bushmen, Masarwa, is frequently encountered. More specific to the Taa are Magon and the Tshasi mentioned above.
The Taa distinguish themselves along at least some of the groups above. Like many San peoples, they also distinguish themselves by the environment they live in, and also by direction. Traill reports the following:
Heinz reports that ' is an exonym given by other Bushmen, and that the Taa call themselves .
The Taa refer to their language as ' "people's language". Westphal adopted the word "person" as the name for the Southern Khoisan language family, which is now called Tuu. The East ǃXoon term for the language is ǃxóɲa ǂâã''.

Phonology

Taa has at least 58 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones, or at least 87 consonants, 20 vowels, and two tones, by many counts the most of any known language if non-oral vowel qualities are counted as different from corresponding oral vowels. These include 20 or 43 click consonants and several vowel phonations, though opinions vary as to which of the 130 or 164 consonant sounds are single segments and which are consonant clusters.

Tones

describes four tones for the East ǃXoon dialect: high, mid, low, and mid-falling. Patterns for bisyllabic bases include high-high, mid-mid, mid-mid-falling, and low-low. DoBeS describes only two tonemes, high and low, for the West ǃXoon dialect. By analyzing each base as bimoraic, Traill's four tones are mapped onto , , , and . Unlike Traill, Naumann does not find a four-way contrast on monomoraic grammatical forms in Eastern ǃXoõ data.
In addition to lexical tone, Traill describes East ǃXoon nouns as falling into two tone classes according to the melody induced on concordial morphemes and transitive verbs: either level or falling. Transitive object nouns from Tone Class I trigger mid/mid-rising tone in transitive verbs, while Tone Class 2 objects correlate with any tone contour. Naumann finds the same results in the eastern ʼNǀohan dialect.

Vowels

Taa has five vowel qualities,. The Traill and DoBeS descriptions differ in the phonations of these vowels; it is not clear if this reflects a dialectal difference or a difference of analysis.

East ǃXoon (Traill)

Traill describes the phonations of the East ǃXoon dialect as plain, murmured, or glottalized. may also be both glottalized and murmured, as well as pharyngealized / or strident /. may be both pharyngealized and glottalized, for 26 vowels not counting nasalization or length.
Murmured vowels after plain consonants contrast with plain vowels after aspirated consonants, and likewise glottalized vowels with ejective consonants, so these are phonations of the vowels and not assimilation with consonant phonation.
Vowels may be long or short, but long vowels may be sequences rather than distinct phonemes. The other vowel quality sequences—better known as diphthongs—disregarding the added complexity of phonation, are.
All plain vowels may be nasalized. No other phonation may be nasalized, but nasalization occurs in combination with other phonations as the second vowel of a sequence. These sequences alternate dialectally with vowel plus velar nasal. That is, the name ǃXóõ may be dialectally, and this in turn may be phonemically, since does not occur word-finally. However, this cannot explain the short nasal vowels, so Taa has at least 31 vowels.
A long, glottalized, murmured, nasalized o with falling tone is written. A long, strident nasalized o with low tone is written, since Traill analyzes stridency as phonemically pharyngealized murmur.

West ǃXoon (DoBeS)

DoBeS describes the phonations of the West ǃXoon dialect as plain, a e i o u; nasalized, an en in on un; epiglottalized or pharyngealized, aq eq iq oq uq; strident, aqh eqh iqh oqh uqh; and glottalized or 'tense', aʼ eʼ iʼ oʼ uʼ.

Consonants

Taa is unusual in allowing mixed voicing in its consonants. These have been called "prevoiced", but they actually appear to be consonant clusters. When homorganic, as in , such clusters are listed in the chart below.
Taa consonants are complex, and it is not clear how much of the difference between the dialects is real and how much is an artifact of analysis.

East ǃXoon (Traill)

The nasal only occurs between vowels, and only word finally, so these may be allophones. also only occur in medial position, except that the last is an allophone of rare initial. and occur in loans, mostly English.
Taa is typologically unusual in having mixed-voice ejectives. Juǀʼhoansi, which is part of the same sprachbund as Taa, has mixed voicing in.
Taa may have as few as 83 click sounds, if the more complex clicks are analyzed as clusters. Given the intricate clusters posited seen in the non-click consonants, it is not surprising that many of the Taa clicks should be analyzed as clusters. However, there is some debate whether these are actually clusters; all non-Khoisan languages in the world that have clusters allow clusters with sonorants like r, l, w, j, and this does not occur in Taa.
There are five click articulations: bilabial, dental, lateral, alveolar, and palatal. There are nineteen series, differing in phonation, manner, and complexity. These are perfectly normal consonants in Taa, and indeed are preferred over non-clicks in word-initial position.
The DoBeS project takes Traill's cluster analysis to mean that only the twenty tenuis, voiced, nasal, and voiceless nasal clicks are basic, with the rest being clusters of the tenuis and voiced clicks with and either or. Work on Taa's sister language Nǁng suggests that all clicks in both languages have a uvular or rear articulation, and that the clicks considered to be uvular here are actually lingual–pulmonic and lingual–glottalic airstream contours. It may be that the 'prevoiced' consonants of Taa, including prevoiced clicks, can also be analyzed as contour consonants, in this case with voicing contours.
* DoBeS only matches 17 series to Traill, as the – and – distinctions he discovered had not yet been published. DoBeS and, respectively, correspond to the former pair, while and correspond to the latter pair.
Traill's account of East ǃXoon leaves for voiceless series of clicks without equivalents with a voiced lead. The DoBeS account of West West ǃXoon, which uses voicing for morphological derivation to a greater extent than East ǃXoon does, has four additional series, written nꞰʼʼ, gꞰʼ, gꞰqʼ and nꞰhh in their practical orthography. The first three match the unpaired glottalized series of Traill, ,,. If Traill's series is the voiced equivalent of plain aspirated, rather than delayed aspirated, that would leave the DobeS nꞰhh series as voiced delayed aspiration.
All nasal clicks have twin airstreams, since the air passing through the nose bypasses the tongue. Usually this is pulmonic egressive. However, the series in Taa is characterized by pulmonic ingressive nasal airflow. Ladefoged & Maddieson state that "This ǃXóõ click is probably unique among the sounds of the world's languages that, even in the middle of a sentence, it may have ingressive pulmonic airflow." Taa is the only language known to contrast voiceless nasal and voiceless nasal aspirated clicks.

West ǃXoon (DoBeS)

West ǃXoon has 164 consonants in a strict unit analysis, including 111 clicks in 23 series, which under a cluster analysis reduce to 87 consonants, including 43 clicks.
These are written in the practical orthography. Marginal consonants are not marked as such.
Vowel nasalization is only phonemic on the second mora, as it is a phonetic effect of the clicks on the first mora. The clicks do not make the following vowel breathy, maintaining a contrast between and. Likewise, while clicks do make the following vowel creaky, there is a delayed onset to the vowel and the amplitude of the glottalization of is less than that of with a phonemically creaky vowel.
In an attempt to keep the phonemic inventory as symmetric as possible, the DoBeS team analyzed as segments two of the click types that Traill analyzed as clusters. These are the pre-glottalized nasal clicks, ʼnꞰ, which Traill had analyzed as, and the voiced aspirated clicks, gꞰh, which Traill had analyzed as.
The expectation, from the morphology of ǃXoon, for voiceless-voiced pairs of click clusters led to the discovery of several series not distinguished by Traill. These are voiced click types which may not exist in East ǃXoon at all, namely nꞰʼʼ, nꞰhh, gꞰʼ, and gꞰqʼ. It also lead to the rediscovery of two series that Traill had not been able to publish before his death. Thus the DoBeS team distinguishes two series, Ʞqh and Ʞh, for Trail's Ʞqh and Ʞkh, as well as Ʞʼʼ and Ʞʼ for Traill's Ʞqʼ and Ʞkʼ. If Traill's Ʞkh series is to be analyzed as kꞰ + h, then that would require a different assessment of Traill's delayed-aspiration series.
Under the contour analysis of Miller, the distinction between simple and contour clicks largely parallels the DoBeS identification of clusters, apart from the last four rows, which are considered to be simple clicks.

Phonotactics

The Taa syllable structure, as described by DoBeS, may be one of the following:
where C is a consonant, V is a vowel, and N is a nasal stop. There is a very limited number of consonants which can occur in the second position and only certain vowel sequences occur. The possible consonant clusters is covered above; C2 may be.

Grammar

Taa is a subject–verb–object language with serial verbs and inflecting prepositions. Genitives, adjectives, relative clauses, and numbers come after the nouns they apply to. Reduplication is used to form causatives. There are five nominal agreement classes and an additional two tone groups. Agreement occurs on pronouns, transitive verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and some particles.

Numbers

Taa has only three native numbers. All numbers above three are loans from Tswana or Kgalagadi.
1 - ǂʔûã
2 - ǂnûm
3 - ǁâe

Phrases

The phrases from Eastern ǃXóõ were compiled by Anthony Traill: