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Khoisan

Ju language(s) (aka Northern Khoisan)

Phonology of Kalahari Basin languages

Lucy Lloyd's !Xuun notebooks: a linguistic edition


Lucy Lloyd's !Xuun (!Kung) notebooks are part of the Bleek and Lloyd collection of texts, word lists, drawings and other documents of and by the /Xam and !Xun people of southern Africa. Collected in the late 19th century by Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, this unique archive is an inestimable record of the life and thought of the San people of Southern Africa at that time, and has been recognised as a UNESCO site of the Memory of the World since 1997.

Although Bleek and Lloyd mainly worked on |Xam (a now extinct Tuu language then spoken throughout central South Africa), Lloyd also worked on !Xuun, another click language, belonging to the Kx'a (Ju-=Hoan) family. A few years after W. Bleek's death, Lloyd spent approximately five years (1879-1884) studying and documenting the !Xuun dialect(s) spoken by N!ani, Tame, /'Uma and Daqa, four young boys originally from modern-day northern Namibia. She left 14 !Xuun notebooks (about 1,000 pages) containing precious data, much of which have yet to be edited and analyzed.

The long-term goal of this project, undertaken in 2009, is to provide a bilingual !Xuun-English edition of the notebooks, as well as a dictionary and a descriptive grammar of the !Xuun dialect(s) spoken by the four boys. So far about 100 pages of wordlists and texts have been processed using the SIL Toolbox program. The dictionary has about 500 entries and a preliminary grammar sketch is in the making.