ABSTRACT
The overwhelming majority of phonetic descriptions of clicks are based on articulatory features (e.g. Doke 1937; Beach 1938; Snyman 1975; Chomsky and Halle 1968; Traill 1985; Sagey 1986; Ladefoged 1989; Taljaard and Snyman 1990). These features are used only to express redundancy-free phonological contrasts. As they have no further justification, they are in a sense arbitrary since there is no linguistic evidence based on phonological processes in the click languages for the features. In this paper we shall examine data from assimilation and language change in the Khoisan languages which provide a novel perspective on the natural classes of clicks. The correct generalisations cannot be framed adequately in terms of the conventional articulatory features but require instead acoustically defined features. The acoustic features also reveal the essential relationships between clicks and non-clicks. These relationships are entirely obscured by articulatory features and as a result the Khoisan consonant inventories in Maddieson’s (1984) survey of phonological inventories show a universally unprecedented lack of uniformity in the consonant systems when it comes to place-of-articulation terms.
