Over the past few days I’ve been trying to read a bit on the Sandawe. Most of the stuff I’ve been able to find is in the domain of linguistics, and is basically unintelligible to me in any substantive manner. The crux of the curiosity here is that the Sandawe, like their Hadza neighbors, have clicks in their language, and so have been classified with the Khoisan. Here’s some background:
The most promising candidate as a relative of Sandawe are the Khoe languages of Botswana and Namibia. Most of the putative cognates Greenberg (1976) gives as evidence for Sandawe being a Khoesan language in fact tie Sandawe to Khoe. Recently Gueldemann and Elderkin have strengthened that connection, with several dozen likely cognates, while casting doubts on other Khoisan connections. Although there are not enough similarities to reconstruct a Proto-Khoe-Sandawe language, there are enough to suggest that the connection is real.
I can’t speak to the validity of this at all, obviously. Some scholars do argue that the clicks in the Sandawe language were only acquired through interaction with peoples such as the Hadza, making an analogy to Xhosa, a Bantu language which has been strongly influenced by Khoi dialects. …