The Ungwatsi language (from the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy)

[Shayna]

I found this post on the message board at IMDB for the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, that says:

Actually believe it or not you can’t learn [the Ungwatsi] language. The people of the Kalahari Desert have an evolutionary abnormality that allows them to make the pronunciations need (sic) for that language.

I tried Googling “Ungwatsi,” with no luck at all (the only results reference the movie or the actor who played the lead, not the language itself). I searched the SDMB archives, as well as the Straight Dope column archives and came up completely blank. I’m curious if anyone has the Straight Dope on the veracity of this claim. And if it’s true, what type of “evolutionary abnormality” would cause a person to be able to speak a specific language, that without it, they’d be unable to?

[pravnik]

No, that’s bullshit. There’s nothing about the Khosian languages that makes them unusable by non-natives except the difficulty of learning them. An anthropologist I once met had a good laugh by telling two !Kung San people getting out of an elevator in a dowtown NYC high rise “you boys enjoy yourselves!” in their own language just as the doors were closing.

[Shayna]

Thanks, pravnik, that’s what I thought. As soon as I read it I was hoping to be able to debunk it, but since there’s absolutely no information that I could find about the Ungwatsi language at all, it was impossible to do so with any authority. I’m glad to know my bullshit meter still works, though.

[askeptic]

I believe you are asking about the “glotal stop” which is a kind of clicking made in the back of the throat. Whether it is a genetic defect I cannot say. I would surmize it is somewhat akin to tongue rolling in Spanish. Apparently somepeople are genetically incapable of such tongue rolls. You might try this link !kung bushmen

[Colibri]

@askeptic

I believe you are asking about the “glotal stop” which is a kind of clicking made in the back of the throat. Whether it is a genetic defect I cannot say. I would surmize it is somewhat akin to tongue rolling in Spanish. Apparently somepeople are genetically incapable of such tongue rolls. You might try this link !kung bushmen

The kind of tongue rolling that is genetically linked (although as it turns out, according to this the evidence for genetic linkage is not all that strong) has absolutely nothing to do with “rolling” one’s r’s in Spanish, as you seem to be implying. You don’t have to roll your tongue to roll your r’s.

[zimaane]

The Khoisan languages incorporate ‘clicks’-sounds made by clicking the tongue against the side of the mouth or teeth. Anyone can make these sounds easily, although the Khoisans are the only languages where they are extensively integrated into normal speech. Some cultures use these sounds in a semi-linguistic way, such as making the ‘tut-tut-tut’ expression to scold a child.

To generalize a bit from the OP, any natural human language can be learned by anyone, given time and motivation.

[Kizarvexius]

I have no cite for this, but one of my linguistics profs said that while the Bushman language does use the “click” sound (identified as “!” in IPA), it appears with far less frequency than one would get the impression from watching The Gods Must Be Crazy. Extra clicks were artificially added to the dialog to make the language sound even more foreign.

[lieu]

I’m not familiar with the Ungwatsi dialect but there was a very interesting show on PBS last night, Journey Of Man that discussed the clicking sounds made by what is thought to be descendants of Africa’s oldest tribes.

It subscribed to the theory that these clicks were lost sometime before the original tribe left Africa on it’s way to populate other cultures and that’s why succeeding dialects don’t contain any of their elements. Positively fascinating show.

[Colibri]

@zimaane

The Khoisan languages incorporate ‘clicks’-sounds made by clicking the tongue against the side of the mouth or teeth. Anyone can make these sounds easily, although the Khoisans are the only languages where they are extensively integrated into normal speech. Some cultures use these sounds in a semi-linguistic way, such as making the ‘tut-tut-tut’ expression to scold a child.

The Hadzane language of East Africa also incorporates click consonants. Recent genetic evidence suggests that the ancestral human language may in fact have incorporated clicks.

Besides the Khoisan languages themselves and the Hadzane, other South African groups have “borrowed” clicks into their own Bantu languages, including Zulu and Xhosa.

@Kizarvexius

I have no cite for this, but one of my linguistics profs said that while the Bushman language does use the “click” sound (identified as “!” in IPA), it appears with far less frequency than one would get the impression from watching The Gods Must Be Crazy. Extra clicks were artificially added to the dialog to make the language sound even more foreign.

Khoisan languages use many varieties of clicks besides the one represented by !. According to this site, in some Khoisan languages up to 70% of words may begin with a click (though not necessarily the one used in TGMBC).

[bordelond]

@askeptic

I believe you are asking about the “glotal stop” which is a kind of clicking made in the back of the throat. Whether it is a genetic defect I cannot say. I would surmize it is somewhat akin to tongue rolling in Spanish. Apparently somepeople are genetically incapable of such tongue rolls.

This information is not accurate on several counts.

Glottal stops are not the salient auditory feature of the click consonants featured in the Khoisan languages. Glottal stops can immediately follow and be somewhat of a secondary feature of a click consonant, but the main auditory signal a listener recieves from a click is a product of the velaric airstream:

The third and final airstream mechanism used by human language is confined to certain languages of southwest Africa. It is called the velaric airstream mechanism. There is regular oral articulation, while the back of tongue seals off air from the lungs and creates a relative vacuum. Air in the mouth is rarified by backward and downward movement of the tongue. When the stricture is released the air rushes in, creating a click. Although we think of such sounds as exotic, English uses a few of them for quasi-linguistic sound gestures: ‘grandmother’s kiss’ (bilabial click), encouraging a horse (lateral click), tisk-tisk (actually a dental or alveolar click).

Glottal stops are easy for anyone to produce – English speakers very nearly invariably use a glottal stop to distinguish the two syllables of the exclamation uh-oh. Dialectal pronunciations of English words using glottal stops – such as the stereotypical Cockney pronunciation of bottle – are not uncommon.

Regarding velarically-produces click consonants, UCLA phonetician Peter Ladefoged posits that click sounds – rather than being monumentally difficult – are some of the easiest for the human vocal apparatus to produce. Ladefoged hints that the paucity of click languages in human languages is something of a mystery (from chapter 8 of Ladefoged’s The Sounds of the World’s Language).