Individual languages have had various orthographies, usually based on either the Lepsius alphabet or on the Latin alphabet. They may change over time or between countries. Latin letters, such as ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ ⟨ç⟩, have case forms; the pipe letters, ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩, do not.[7]
By the early 19th century, the otherwise unneeded letters ⟨c⟩ ⟨x⟩ ⟨q⟩ were used as the basis for writing clicks in Zulu by British and German missions.[8] 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 those of the Standard Alphabet by Lepsius, which were based on a single symbol (pipe, double pipe, pipe-acute, pipe-sub-dot) and from which the modern Khoekhoe letters ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩ descend.
Clement Doke expanded on Jones' letters in 1923. Based on an empirically informed conception of the nature of click consonants, he analyzed voiced and nasal clicks as separate consonants, much as voiced plosives and nasals are considered separate consonants from voiceless plosives among the pulmonic consonants, and so added letters for voiced and nasal clicks. (Jones' palatal click letter was not used, however. Jones had called it "velar", and Doke called palatal clicks "alveolar".) Doke was the first to report retroflex clicks.
Файл:Beach Khoekhoe click letters.pngThe clicks of Khoekhoe in the Beach alphabet of 1938. The series are (left to right) dental, alveolar, lateral and palatal. In modern orthography, the last column is ǂg ǂn ǂkh ǂ ǂh.
Douglas Beach would publish a somewhat similar system in his phonetic description of Khoekhoe. Because Khoekhoe had no voiced clicks, he only created new letters for the four nasal clicks. Again, he didn't use Jones' "velar" click letter, but created one of his own, Шаблон:Angbr IPA, based on the Lepsius letter Шаблон:Angbr IPA but graphically modified to better fit the design of the IPA.
Besides the difference in letter shape (variations on a pipe for Lepsius, modifications of Latin letters for Jones), there was a conceptual difference between them and Doke or Beach: 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),[25] whereas Doke used a separate letter for each tenuis, voiced, and nasal click, treating each as a distinct consonant, 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).
Beach wrote on Khoekhoe and so had no need for letters for the voiced clicks; he created letters for nasal clicks by adding a curl to the bottom of the tenuis-click letters: Шаблон:Angbr IPA.
Transcribing voicing, nasalization and the velar–uvular distinction
Doke had run "admirable" experiments establishing the nature of click consonants as unitary sounds. Nonetheless, Bleek in his highly influential work on Bushman languages rejected Doke's orthography on theoretical grounds, arguing that each of Doke's letters stood for two sounds, "a combination of the implosive sound with the sound made by the expulsion of the breath" (that is, influx plus efflux), and that it was impossible to write the clicks themselves in Doke's orthography, as "we cannot call [the implosive sounds] either unvoiced, voiced, or nasal."[28] Bleek therefore used digraphs based on the Lepsius letters, as Lepsius himself had done for the same reason. However, linguists have since come down on the side of Doke and take the two places of articulation to be inherent in the nature of clicks, because both are required to create a click: the 'influx' cannot exist without the 'efflux', so a symbol for an influx has only theoretical meaning just as a symbol like Шаблон:Angbr IPA for 'alveolar consonant' does not indicate any actual consonant. Regardless, today separate letters like Doke's are not provided by the IPA (or other systems), and linguists resort to diacritics that would not be used for non-click consonants. (For example, no-one transcribes a alveolar nasal stopШаблон:IPA as Шаблон:Angbr IPA or Шаблон:Angbr IPA analogous to the way one writes a dental nasal click as Шаблон:Angbr IPA or Шаблон:Angbr IPA in current IPA or as Шаблон:Angbr IPA or Шаблон:Angbr IPA in pre-Kiel IPA.)
Summarized below are the common means of representing voicing, nasalization and dorsal place of articulation, from Bleek's digraphs reflecting an analysis as co-articulated consonants, to those same letters written as superscripts to function as diacritics, reflecting an analysis as unitary consonants, to the more common IPA combining diacritics for voicing and nasalization. Because the last option cannot indicate the posterior place of articulation, it does not distinguish velar from uvular clicks. The letter Ʞ is used here as a wildcard for any click letter.
Velar
Uvular
Tenuis
Voiced
Nasal
Tenuis
Voiced
Nasal
Coarticulation analysis
k͡Ʞ
ɡ͡Ʞ
ŋ͡Ʞ
q͡Ʞ
ɢ͡Ʞ
ɴ͡Ʞ
Superscript diacritics, unitary analysis
ᵏꞰ
ᶢꞰ
ᵑꞰ
𐞥Ʞ
𐞒Ʞ
ᶰꞰ
Combining diacritics, unitary analysis
Ʞ
Ʞ̬
Ʞ̬̃
A distinction may be made between Шаблон:Angbr IPA for an inaudible rear articulation, Шаблон:Angbr IPA for an audible one, and Шаблон:Angbr IPA for a notably delayed release of the rear articulation.
Historical orthographies
Written languages with clicks generally use an alphabet either based on the Lepsius alphabet, with multigraphs based on the pipe letters for clicks, or on the Zulu alphabet, with multigraphs based on c q x for clicks. In the latter case, there have been several conventions for the palatal clicks. Some languages have had more than one orthography over the years. For example, Khoekhoe has had at least the following, using dental clicks as an example:
Khoekhoe orthographies (illustrated with dental clicks)
Modern
ǀguis
ǀa
ǀham
ǀnu
Beach (1938)
ʇuis
ʇʔa
ʇham
𝼍u
Tindall (1858)
cguis
ca
cham
cnu
Historical roman orthographies have been based on the following sets of letters:
There are two principal conventions for writing the manners of articulation (the 'effluxes'), which are used with both the Lepsius and Zulu orthographies. One uses g for voicing and x for affricate clicks; the other uses d for voicing and g for affricate clicks. Both use n for nasal clicks, but these letters may come either before or after the base letter. For simplicity, these will be illustrated across various orthographies using the lateral clicks only.
Conventions for click manners (illustrated on lateral clicks)
↑The original Lepsius letters actually did have case forms. For example, Шаблон:Harvtxt wrote Amaxhosa and Xhosa as Amaııósa and 𝖨𝖨ósa.
↑ 8,08,18,2Файл:Norwegian click letters.pngZulu click letters of the Norwegian missionThe Norwegian mission to the Zulu used Шаблон:Angbr (a z-like zig-zag) for c (perhaps related to the use of both z and c for dental affricates), a double ϟ (a ξ-like zigzag) for x (perhaps not coincidentally, Greek ξ is transcribed x), and the same letter with an umlaut for q.
↑The Lepsius letter is a short vertical pipe, with neither ascender nor descender—that is, of the same height as the letter n–nor serifs. In Krönlein it has a short ascender, the height of the letter t, and moreover in Krönlein the four pipe letters are always inclined, like the letters in italic type.
↑The double-barred pipe was proposed by the Rhenish Mission Conference in 1856 and quickly replaced Lepsius's pipe with acute accent. (Brugman, 2009, Segments, Tones and Distribution in Khoekhoe Prosody. PhD dissertation, Cornell.)
↑Tindall (1858) A grammar and vocabulary of the Namaqua-Hottentot language Tindall's full paradigm is,
↑The letter Шаблон:Angbr IPA (Шаблон:IPA) is 'implicit' in the IPA but is not included in the summary IPA chart. It is uncommon, and ad hocШаблон:Angbr IPA is often used in the literature.
↑Linguasphere found the Khoisanist/IPA letters to be impractical for sorting and with their database, and so substituted them with p', c', q', l', t'. These occur with the usual accompaniments, for sequences such as L'xegwi, Nc'hu, C'qwi, and Q'xung. Lingvarium did something similar for Cyrillic.
↑In Doke's publications there is no ascender on the middle stroke, as was common in sans-serif ('grotesk') fonts of the day, and as seen in modern Arial font.
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