Juǀʼhoan language

Juʼhoan, also known as Southern or Southeastern ǃKung or ǃXun, is the southern variety of the ǃKung dialect continuum, spoken in northeastern Namibia and the Northwest District of Botswana by San Bushmen who largely identify themselves as Juǀʼhoansi. Several regional dialects are distinguished: Epukiro, Tsumǃkwe, Rundu, Omatako and ǂKxʼauǁʼein, with Tsumǃkwe being the best described and often taken as representative.

Name

The name Juǀʼhoan is also rendered Žuǀʼhõa – or occasionally Zhuǀʼhõa or Dzuǀʼhõa, depending on orthography. Depending on the classification, it is considered the Southern or Southeastern variety of the ǃKung language cluster. It may thus be referred to as Southern ǃKung, Southeastern ǃXun, etc. Juǀʼhoan is based on the word ju 'people', which is also applied to the language cluster..

Phonology

Vowels

When a front vowel /e/ or /i/ follows a consonant with a back vowel constraint, an is inserted before the front vowel, written 'a' in the orthography. For example, mi |'ae reads /mi |'əe/.
The diphthong /oa/ may be realized as .

Juǀʼhoan has five vowel qualities, which may be nasalized, glottalized, murmured, or combinations of these, and most of these possibilities occur both long and short. The qualities and may also be pharyngealized and strident. Besides, it is a tonal language with four tones: very high, high, low and very low tones. Thus, there are a good 30 vowel phonemes, perhaps more, depending on one's analysis. There are, in addition, many vowel sequences and diphthongs.

Consonants

Juǀʼhoan has an unusually large number of consonants, as typical for ǃKung. The following occur at the beginnings of roots. For brevity, only the alveolar clicks are listed with the other consonants; the complete set of clicks is found below.
Tenuis and modally voiced consonants may occur with any vowel quality. However, other consonants do not occur in the same root as murmured, glottalized, or epiglottalized vowels.
The prevoiced aspirated and ejective consonants, both pulmonic and clicks, contain a voiceless interval, which Miller attributes to a larger glottal opening than is found in Hindustani breathy-voiced consonants. Phonetically, however, they are voice contours, starting out voiced but becoming voiceless for the aspiration or ejection.
The phonemic status of and is uncertain. may be epenthetic before vowel-initial words; alternatively, it may be that no word may begin with a vowel. occurs only in a single morpheme, the plural diminutive enclitic. and only occur in loan words, and some accounts posit a and. Labials are very rare initially, though is common between vowels. Velar stops are rare initially and very rare medially.
The uvulo-ejective consonants are analyzed as epiglottalized in Miller-Ockhuizen. They have uvular frication and glottalization, and are similar to consonants in Nǀu described as uvular ejective by Miller et al.. Their epiglottal character may be a phonetic consequence of the raised larynx involved in making them ejective.
Only a small set of consonants occur between vowels within roots. These are:

Labial	Alveolar	Velar	Uvular	Glottal


		,

Medial are very common; are rare, and the other medial consonants occur in only a very few roots, many of them loans. are generally analyzed as allophones of. However, especially may correspond to multiple root-initial consonants.
Juǀʼhoan has 48 click consonants. There are four click "types": dental, lateral, alveolar, and palatal, each of which found in twelve series or "accompaniments". These are perfectly normal consonants in Juǀʼhoan, and indeed are preferred over non-clicks in word-initial position.
As above, tenuis and modally voiced consonants may occur with any vowel quality. However, other consonants do not occur in the same root as murmured, glottalized, or epiglottalized vowels.
Glottalized clicks occur almost exclusively before nasal vowels. This suggests they are nasalized, as in most if not all other languages with glottalized clicks. The nasalization would not be audible during the click itself due to the glottalization, which would prevent any nasal airflow, but the velum would be lowered, potentially nasalizing adjacent vowels.
The 'uvularized' clicks are actually linguo-pulmonic contours,, etc. The 'uvulo-ejective' clicks are heterorganic affricates, and equivalent to linguo-glottalic consonants transcribed, etc., in other languages.
See Ekoka ǃXung for a related variety with a somewhat larger click inventory.

Orthographic history

Juʼhoan is the only variety of ǃKung to be written. Three orthographies have been used over the past half century, two based on pipe letters for clicks and one using only the basic Latin alphabet.
In the 1960s, the South African Department of Education set about establishing official orthographies for the languages of Southwest Africa. Jan Snyman was selected to develop an orthography for the then-unwritten Juǀʼhoasi, which was accepted in 1969. In this orthography, the name of the language is spelled Žuǀʼhõasi. A slightly modified form is shown below.
In the 1980s, the Bible Society of South Africa requested a new orthography, one that used only letters of the Latin alphabet, avoided diacritics as much as possible, and conformed as much as possible to the conventions of Afrikaans. This second orthography was accepted in 1987, in which the language is spelled Zjuc'hôa.
A third orthography was developed by the Juǀwa Bushman Development Foundation in 1994. This is the orthography that is currently in use in Namibia; there does not seem to be any publication in Botswana.
The three orthographies, along with the IPA, are compared below. Tone is evidently unmarked.
The modern orthography also has ih, eh, ah, oh, uh for breathy vowels, and ihn, ahn, ohn, uhn for breathy nasal vowels. However, Snyman maintains that these are positional variants of low-tone vowels, and not needed in an orthography. Glottalized vowels are written with an apostrophe in all three orthographies.

Grammar

Juǀ'hoan is an isolating, head-initial language that follows a fairly strict SVO word order. There are some exceptions; for instance, interrogatives are formed using the particle ré, which is placed immediately after the subject, but it is also possible to place this emphasis on the object by moving it to the beginning of the sentence and following it with ré instead, as in:

Nouns and pronouns

Nouns are grouped into five noun classes based on animacy and species. Noun class in Juǀ’hoan is entirely covert on the noun and revealed only by agreement behavior between the noun and pronominal elements. In other words, nouns do not inflect for class; the only difference between nouns of different classes is the different sets of third person pronouns associated with each class.
Noun class distinctions are wholly uninfluenced by literal, physical characteristics, and this covert pronominal class marking structure may have resulted from language contact. Juǀ’hoan has no articles nor any other distinction of definiteness or indefiniteness.

Number

Nouns inflect for plural number, which is formed by the suffixing of -si or -sín or by no change, -Ø. Many nouns have irregular plurals, such as jù, and the plural form of a noun is not predictable.
Each noun class has its own associated pronoun set, constituting the only morphological difference between noun classes. For example, the noun gǂhòà, "dog", belongs to Class 2, and may be referred to with the third person pronoun ha, whereas gǀúí, "forest", belongs to Class 5, which has ká as its corresponding pronoun.
The noun classes and their pronoun sets are as follows:

Class	General	Possessed	Description	Example
1	ha ; sá ; hì, sì	mà ; hìsì	humans and kinship	jù "person"
2	ha ; hì	mà ; hìsì	animals and races	gǂhòà "dog"
3	ha	mà ; màsì	plants and food	ǁxòè "meteor"
4	hì	hì ; hìsì	long objects	gǁùú, "meteor"
5	ká	gá ; gásì	body parts	gǀúí "forest"

Demonstrative pronouns are as follows:

Class	Demonstrative
1	ǁʼàhaà ; ǁʼàsà ; ǁʼàsìsà, ǁʼàhìsà
2	ǁʼàhaà ; ǁʼàhìsà
3	ǁʼàhaà
4	ǁʼàhìà ; ǁʼàhìsà
5	ǁʼàkáà ; ǁʼàkásà

Pronouns

Pronouns are inflected for number but not case or gender, and unlike nouns, they have three numbers, singular, dual and plural, as well as inclusive and exclusive forms.
The Juǀ’hoan personal pronouns are:
An indefinite pronoun, equivalent to English "one" can be expressed using jù as in:

Noun derivation

Juǀ'hoan nouns are derived by the addition of various suffixes to a verb.

Suffix	Description	Verb	Noun Form	English
-kxàò	Agentive	n!arih	n!arihkxàò	driver
-sí	Place/Manner	n!ún	n!únsí	position
-Ø	Same Form	gǀaoh	gǀaoh	strength
-a	Non-Specific	jaqm	jaqma	thinness

Verbs

Juǀ'hoan verbs are attributive and unconjugated for tense; aspectual distinctions of time are indicated adverbially.
Verb phrases are negated by the particle ǀóá, which precedes the verb. Verbs can also be negated by the simple particle compound ǀóá kú.
Reversing the components of this negation compound to ǀóá kú implies that the negated action has never or will never happen, as in:
Most distinctions of tense are adverbial constructions using specific adverbs of time, such as:

|ámà hè
goàqǂ’àn
n!homà

Less commonly, a simple past tense can be indicated by the particle koh, and the imperfective aspect by kú, both of which precede the verb:
In combination, koh and kú equate to a habitual action, as in:

Imperative

With very few exceptions, the imperative form is identical to a standard present tense verb. Orthographically, this kind of imperative is indicated by a double exclamation mark.
A more emphatic imperative is expressed by the addition of the second person pronoun, and negative imperatives are expressed by the verb nǀǀah or its imperfective form nǀǀah kú, which is often abbreviated to nǀǀaú.
Using a first or third person pronoun before an imperative implies a sense of obligation.
It is also possible to soften a command by using a special form of the second person pronoun, há, alongside the verbal particle m.

Irregular verbs

Some verbs have irregular forms when taking a plural subject or object. Transitive verbs take the irregular plural form when the object is plural, whereas intransitive verbs take the irregular plural when the subject is plural. Some irregulars are shown below:

Sing. Subj.	Pl. Subj.	Definition
n!áng	g!hòó	sit
n!ún'	gǁá	stand
nǂhao	tàqm	fall
!ò’á	xáí	break

Thus:

Reflexive and reciprocal

The particles |’àè and |’àèsì express reflexive action.
Reciprocity is expressed via the pronoun khòè. The preceding verb must always take the transitive suffix -a.
Oftentimes, reflexive or reciprocal constructions are used to indicate the equivalent of the English passive voice, which does not formally exist in Juǀ'hoan.

Transitivity

Intransitive verbs can be made transitive by the addition of the suffix -a, which takes a tone identical to the last tone of the verb itself. If this suffix is added to a verb which is already inherently transitive, the verb becomes a “double transitive,” allowing a second noun phrase to come after the first. The second phrase must follow the transitive particle kò and will have an aspectual significance, as in:
Creissels labels these verbs as ditransitive because multiple verb phrases can be strung together by kò against the nominalizing suffix -a, regardless of function. Baker and Collins argue that this linking function of kò governs syntactic relationships between differing aspectual distinctions, a feature that Juǀ'hoan shares with other Khoisan languages.

Locatives

Juǀ'hoan lacks prepositions; in place of them, the relative positions of objects are expressed using nouns that function as Locative indicators.

Noun	Literal meaning	Locative meaning
n!áng	innards, inside	in
tzí	veld, outside	out, around
din	buttock, backside	under
ǀhó	face, flat surface	on
ǁ’ámí	center, middle	between
!ká	heart	in the midst of
!óm	side	beside

These nouns are metaphorically “possessed” by the object that they modify, necessitating a possessive construction. Furthermore, if the possessor object is qualified by an adjective, the possessive particle ǁ’àn must be used, as in:
In many other cases, this prepositional information is encoded directly into the verb, as in:

nǃáú
ǁ’àbà
ǁxàrì

Verbs of this sort can be used to qualify the action of another verb in sequence, as in:
These are known as serial verbs, wherein the second verb in the sequence qualifies the direction or location of the first verb. If the second verb in this two-verb sequence is transitive, then the noun phrase following it would be its object, but if the second verb is intransitive, then the following noun phrase would be its subject. Thus:

Adjectives

Since Juǀ'hoan verbs are attributive, there are relatively few true adjectives in the language. Adjectives follow the noun and most have singular and plural forms, although a few have only one or the other, and there are some adjectives with suppletive plural forms. The following is a comprehensive list of all adjectives in Juǀ'hoan, together with their plural forms.

Adjective	Plural	Definition
dí	-sín	female
dóré	-sín	strange, different
gèsín	-sín	remaining, other
jàn	-sín	good, correct
zé	-sín	new
ǀ’hoàn	-sì	real, true
!’àn	-sì	old, worn

Common words and phrases

ján ǀàm – Good day
ǂxáí – Good morning
ǁáú tzà – Good evening
gǁàán - Good afternoon
à ján – How are you?
ǁáú gè – Goodbye
jù – person
jú – people
gǃú, dohmsoan – water
nǃaisi u – Bon voyage

Sample texts

Following are some sample texts in the Juǀʼhoan language.

Films

1980 – The Gods Must Be Crazy
1980 – ''Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman''