In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients

[pynchonoid]

Thankfully, the European's genocide in Africa (see V.,
GR, M&D) failed to eliminate all of the speakers of
these languages.
-Doug



March 18, 2003

In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the
Ancients
By NICHOLAS WADE

o some of today's languages still hold a whisper of
the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern
humans? Many linguists say language changes far too
fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study
underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of
languages, raising the possibility that their
distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human
mother tongue.

They are the click languages of southern Africa. About
30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San,
traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who
include hunters and herders. 

Each language has a set of four or five click sounds,
which are essentially double consonants made by
sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth.
Outside of Africa, the only language known to use
clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in
Australia that was taught only to men for initiation
rites.

Some of the Bantu-speaking peoples who reached
southern Africa from their homeland in western Africa
some 2,000 years ago have borrowed certain clicks from
the Khwe, one use being to substitute for consonants
in taboo words. 

There are reasons to assume that the click languages
may be very old. One is that the click speakers
themselves, particularly a group of hunter-gatherers
of the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient
genetic lineage, according to analysis of their DNA.
They are called the Ju|'hoansi, with the upright bar
indicating a click. ("Ju|'hoansi" is pronounced like
"ju-twansi" except that the "tw" is a click sound like
the "tsk, tsk" of disapproval.)

All human groups are equally old, being descended from
the same ancestral population. But geneticists can now
place ethnic groups on a family tree of humankind.
Groups at the ends of short twigs, the ones that split
only recently from earlier populations, are younger,
in a genealogical sense, than those at the ends of
long branches. Judged by mitochondrial DNA, a genetic
element passed down in the female line, the
Ju|'hoansis' line of descent is so ancient that it
goes back close to the very root of the human family
tree. [...]

continues:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/science/social/18CLIC.html>


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