May 21
Click Consonants: Curiosities and Conundrums
The Linguistics Department presents a Linguistics colloquium by William G. Bennett '06 (special major in Anthropological Linguistics.) William is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa.
Click sounds are a bit unusual in that they are produced easily and in abundance by people all over the world, but they are used as normal speech sounds only* in Subsaharan Africa. This talk looks at the distribution of click sounds across the world's languages, with a particular eye towards marginalized languages and what they can show us about how these sounds behave in sound systems. The main points: certain anomalous characteristics can be explained by aerodynamic factors in how clicks are articulated, while other quirks of clicks push us to look deeper into evolution and development for explanations.
Meet William at a reception before the talk in the Linguistics lounge (Willis Hall 401) from 3-4 pm.