Tenuis retroflex click

The voiceless or more precisely tenuis retroflex click is a rare click consonant. There is no symbol for it in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The Douglas Martyn Beach convention is , used in practical orthography.

Tenuis retroflex velar click
k͡‼
Tenuis retroflex uvular click
q͡‼
(etc)

Features

Features of the tenuis retroflex click:

  • The airstream mechanism is lingual ingressive (also known as velaric ingressive), which means a pocket of air trapped between two closures is rarefied by a "sucking" action of the tongue, rather than being moved by the glottis or the lungs/diaphragm. The release of the forward closure produces the "click" sound. Voiced and nasal clicks have a simultaneous pulmonic egressive airstream.
  • Its phonation is voiceless, unaspirated, and unglottalized, which means it is produced without vibration or constriction of the vocal cords, and any following vowel starts without significant delay.
  • It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
  • It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.

Occurrence

The tenuis retroflex click is only confirmed from a single language, Central !Kung.

LanguageWordIPAMeaning

Notes

    gollark: We need it to scale to keep technology existing.
    gollark: Yes, or based on how hard it was or something.
    gollark: Anarchoprimitivism is not to occur. Arachnoprimitivism MAYBE.
    gollark: The tribal hunter-gathery allocate-resources-through-social-mechanisms thing does NOT scale.
    gollark: You can't call a system, the whole point of which is to organize people, "perfect", if it does not actually work on people.
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