language origins Archives - Pints of History

Speech May Have Begun with Clicks Instead of Words

by David Tollen | Sep 14, 2014 | Human Origins & the Paleolithic, Australia, the Islands, & Further Africa before the Modern Age, Linguistics & Philology

Southern Africa’s Khoi-San languages use clicks alongside more familiar consonants and verbs. Some have more than a hundred tongue-made ticks, clops, troks, and other sorts of clicks, giving them around 150 sounds. That’s more than any other language....