Modifier Letter Alveolar Click

It marks a superscript version of a ǂ-type click release. A click consonant is made by sealing part of the mouth with the tongue and releasing it; in phonetic transcription, 𐞸 can mark a secondary, incomplete, brief, or inserted release.

How did click notation develop?

Click notation grew from individual marks into a family of phonetic letters. A survey published in 1971 identifies Sir Thomas Herbert’s 1638 notation as the earliest original click notation it reviews; earlier travelers described clicks without stable transcription. Le Vaillant’s 1790 marks distinguished click formations, including ones then labeled alveolar or palatal.

The Lepsius notation family, an older system for writing clicks, later developed from a simple bar into ǀ, ǁ, ǃ, and ǂ. Xhosa orthography uses c, q, and x; many orthographies for Khoisan languages in southern Africa use pipe-derived letters. A proposal published in 2020 treats superscripting as phonetic information and gives partial, secondary, and incidental releases as uses for a dedicated modifier.

Why does the name say alveolar?

The name preserves an older label for the click marked by ǂ. Older letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system for writing speech sounds, included ʇ, ʖ, and ʗ; they were abandoned in 1989 in favor of pipe-derived letters. Modern IPA terminology calls ǂ the palatal click and ǃ the (post)alveolar click, so 𐞸’s permanent Unicode name does not match the modern label for the click it modifies.