Taa
March 31, 2024 to April 13, 2024
Taa is one of those languages you may have heard indirectly referred to as an "African click language". With at least 85 phonemic click consonants and certainly being spoken within the African countries of Namibia and Botswana, the assessment isn't actually wrong. But I'd like to demystify how click consonants work and how the figure of 85 clicks gets added up.
Firstly: what is a click? A click sound is a type of speech sound that works like any other consonant. Clicks can begin words or be found in the middle of them, like in the words !Khong and Ju|'hoan. They're produced almost like normal consonants like "t" or "p", but the back of the tongue is raised to create a pocket of concentrated air that can be released to make a clicking sound.
Clicks work almost exactly like any other stop consonant, meaning they can be unvoiced (like p, t, k), voiced (like b, d, g), nasal (m, n), even aspirated (like Indian languages' ph, th, chh, kh, bh, dh, jh, gh), to name only a few of their possible traits.
Taa's click consonants are unusual even among other "click languages" because they have complex consonants, which are consonants followed by the sounds [x], [kχ], and [q].
In most languages these would be analyzed as consonant clusters, or two distinct consonants in a row. But every language with consonant clusters necessarily allows them to consist of at least one of /w l r y/, like in English words "plush" or "press". Taa does not permit these clusters, which is how linguists decided that Taa doesn't have true consonant clusters, but rather complex consonants. Of Taa's at least 85 click consonants, 42 are "complex".
​Click consonants are typically transcribed with a velar character (like g, ŋ, k) alongside a click symbol (like ʘ or ǂ) to show the location of the front closure.
Click consonants are often misunderstood for this reason, with many believing them to be standalone consonants. In reality, though, languages that have any clicks at all will typically have at least as many of them as it has other plosives. For instance, if you look at Taa's non-click sounds /d̪, t̪, t̪ʰ, ̬ d̪̊ʰ, t̪χ, ̬ dÌ¥χ, t̪ʼ, t̪ʼkχʼ, ̬ d̪̊ʼkχʼ/, it has at least one click sound to match each of their places and manners of articulation.
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Hopefully this article helped introduce the complexity of click consonants! Keep an eye out for a blog on my Medium for a more in-depth explanation, because this article certainly did not help clear things up. While click consonants are complex and fascinating, there are a lot more similarities between them and pulmonic consonants than you'd think at first.
Sylheti
March 17, 2024 to March 30, 2024
Semai
March 3, 2024 to March 16, 2024
Semai is a language spoken by around 60,000 in Mainland Malaysia, some 2,000 of which are monolinguals. It's an Austroasiatic language that's distantly related to Vietnamese and Khmer.
Semai and one of its relatives, Jahai, are unique because of their root olfactory terminology. Basically, the same way we have color terms to abstractly categorize visual experiences, those languages have abstract terms to categorize experiences to do with the sense of smell.
It doesn't sound particularly remarkable at first. In English we can say that something smells "musty" or "rotten"--but crucially, those terms aren't abstract. They refer to physical properties or substances and the odor adjectives are essentially saying "something that smells like this substance", so it's not abstract the way Semai and Jahai olfactory terms are.
So Semai and Jahai both have abstract concepts of smell, with root words for the smell of urine, the smell of petrol and bat guano, and the smell of crushed hair lice and squirrel blood. I find it really fascinating how these terms--much like the word "red" can refer to things as different as flowers and blood--form semantic groupings between superficially unrelated concepts through the sense of smell.
What's more, though, Semai has a system called "root pattern morphology". Essentially, an abstract smell is a set of some consonants, like the root "s'_k", which refers to stinging, rancid smells. By changing the vowels in the root, you can clarify what you mean. "s'ik" is the smell of onions and dirty hair, while "s'ek" smells like rancid meat and "s'uk" covers rotten animals. Of particular interest with this system is that the different vowels indicate the intensity of the smell.
Honestly, I have no good conclusion for this, other than languages vary a lot more than you might imagine, and in very creative ways.
Nuosu (ê†ˆêŒ ê’¿)
Feb 18, 2024 to March 2, 2024
Nuosu is a language spoken by 2 million in the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan in China, as well as in neighboring countries. It's also called Yi and is a Tibeto-Burman distantly related to the Chinese languages.
As you may have noticed in the title, I first came to learn of Nuosu through it's script–it looks quite unlike any other script in the world. The Yi script was once a logography like Chinese, with as many as 90,000 different symbols when you count their many, many regional variations. In 1974, however, the Sichuanese government standardized the system into a syllabary with around 800 symbols.
Syllabaries, like the Japanese kana systems, generally have one letter for an entire syllable. While there are only around 142 total kana symbols in Japanese (including diacritics), Nuosu's complex sound system results in far more. Notably, Nuosu is a tonal language, but even that does not account for the majority of the symbols, tones are often written as diacritics.
Nuosu has 43 consonants and 9 vowels in a surprisingly symmetrical sound system. In addition to the native script, Yi also has a romanization based on Pinyin. Its native script is mandatory on street signs, though, for those only literate in it.
Luckily, the speaker base is currently thriving, with 60% of Nuosu speakers being monolingual and the language's overall vitality within school systems. We can expect to see Nuosu survive in future years as the standard Yi language and with its actively growing speaker population.
Tzeltal
Feb 4, 2024 to Feb 17, 2024
Tzeltal is a Mayan language spoken primarily in Mexico by 590,000 speakers. While it has many dialects, I want to focus on Tenajapan Tzeltal, the variety I know the most about.
Earlier this year, I was taking a summer course in Harvard on Language and Thought. The main, controversial theory in question was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the languages you speak affect your cognitive abilities.
There's a lot of really popular examples of this theory, most of them discreditable.
One involves languages like Tenejapan Tzeltal and Guugu Yimithirr (an Indigenous Australian language), which are notable for using a geocentric coordination system. Basically, instead of talking about physical space with relative (egocentric) words like "left", "right", "in front", and "behind", speakers of these languages use absolute terms that correspond to "north", "east", "south", and "west".
The Tenejapan Tzeltal live on an inclined territory from highland south to lowland north--so the word "ajk'ol" (uphill) means south and "alan" (downhill) refers to the north. A third word, "jejch" (crosshill) is used for both east and west, like how you might refer to uptown, downtown, and crosstown.
There's a popular anecdote first conveyed by Brown and Levinson (1993) about a Tzeltal speaker who spun 20 times in a swivel chair but still correctly identified direction.
But linguist Peggy Li was skeptical. I had the pleasure of attending a guest lecture from her in person at Harvard, where she explained her own research on speakers of Tenejapan Tzeltal.
It turned out that the anecdotes were greatly exaggerated: when she replicated the swivel chair story in a controlled experiment setting, Tzeltal speakers did not reason better geocentrically than egocentrically, despite common belief. In fact, in her other experiments, Tzeltal speakers actually did better with egocentric than geocentric reasoning, just like English speakers. Tzeltal is a lesson--you shouldn't treat anecdotes like scientific research.
Palestinian Arabic
مرØبا (marhaba) - Hello!
Jan 21, 2024 to Feb 3, 2024
There's a common saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
While there is some truth to the statement--like how Spanish and Italian are much more similar than Mandarin or Cantonese or mostly any Arabic dialect to another--it ignores other factors. After all, Morocco and Iraq speak "dialects" of Arabic, but very much possess their own militaries.
There is, however, a major Arabic-speaking people who are dispossessed of a legitimate military, a fact which has been at the top of the news for months. I am referring, of course, to Palestinian people, who are especially relevant now given this week's boycott.
As for Palestinian Arabic itself, the dialect without an army or a navy, substantial literature began to be produced within it when British imperialism began in 1918.
From 1918 and beyond, Palestinian Arabic literature was rooted around the idea of resistance and maintaining claims to land. That usage held on for decades, and the language choice was surprisingly ideal. One of the most notable things about the Palestine's side of the conflict is that it draws the sympathy of the entire Muslim world.
So when we talk about a country speaking a "dialect" of Arabic, its actual meaning is less about sovereignty--we're not saying that Morocco doesn't have "an army and a navy"--and more about unity. The Arab world is united under the common language of "Arabic". China is united under the common language of "Chinese". That's not to say that these monolith terms don't cause problems, because they can, but they're not inherent. Palestine not having a military isn't why it speaks an Arabic 'dialect'. Language and politics are always connected, but not always how it might seem.