Talk:Nǁng language

Mistake?

“…in the Cape Town province signed over to them”

Wikipeditor 08:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Contradiction

The number of speakers of the language in the article differs from the number in the table right of it. in the article: "Today there are 20 living speakers,..." in the table: "Total speakers: 10" ...so one of them is wrong. --Imploder 16:12, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Clicks in IPA

I believe the click consonants are a bit misrepresented in the tables. There the voiced clicks are markes with a preceding superscript g, like [^gǁ], this is however not proper IPA, it should be [ɡǁ], in the same way, the voiceless ("plain") ones should be marked [kǁ] instead of [ǁ] (and so on). — N-true (talk) 00:14, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

A precise transcription would be to use a voicing diacritic, but that's difficult to read. The source of this article uses superscript letters as part of a argument that [ɡǁ] is theoretically incorrect. kwami (talk) 01:59, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

As far as I know, the only correct way in IPA to represent voice(d/less)ness in clicks, is to precede it with either [k] or [ɡ]. There's no such thing as a "superscript g" in IPA, so what is merely an ideosyncracy or an author's convention. But I'd be interested in that argument, that [ɡǁ] (and consorts) are incorrect. — N-true (talk) 04:30, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

You can superscript any IPA symbol to shade the value of an adjacent symbol. So, affricate [t^s] (especially when the frication is light), or diphthong [a^e]. She's superscripting in that sense. As for why, she argues that ǁq is a sequence the way an affricate or diphthong is, but that plain ǁ is not. Therefore, writing the latter as kǁ would be wrong, even with the tie bar. Same argument for ^gǁ, which is voiced ǁ, not a sequence like ǁq. The problem is that voicing and nasalization diacritics don't work well with pipe symbols. kwami (talk) 11:30, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Pharyngeal closure!?!

Isn't that supposed to be impossible? Is the closure perhaps epiglottal, given the fact that epiglottalized vowels are already known to be present in the language? David Marjanović (talk) 00:05, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps that's what they mean. Epiglottal is simply lower pharyngeal in some classifications. (I haven't read the paper for a while.) kwami (talk) 00:47, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that's a prompt answer! Thanks! David Marjanović (talk) 12:30, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I just had a look at the references. The paper that is linked to says (p. 26) the closure is uvulo-pharyngeal, at the back of the uvula, and explicitely denies twice (pp. 3, 23) that it's epiglottal. I'll read the 2nd half of the paper this evening and edit this and the Click consonant article accordingly. David Marjanović (talk) 14:02, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Again, I haven't read it for a while, but that rings a bell. It looks like the diff from uvular is allophonic, which is probably why I transcribed these with /q/. kwami (talk) 20:43, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation

How should Nǁng be pronounced? --JorisvS (talk) 21:56, 21 March 2014 (UTC)