My notes on Athabaskan languages

[James Crippen]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 22:30, Andrej A. Kibrik <aakibrik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> I enjoyed your site very much. I looked up the Athabaskan languages
> information, and also the page about salmon. Great job!

Thanks! Your contributions only help make it better. Feel free to
suggest anything else you think might fit. I’m especially interested
in indigenous names for languages.

> I am not sure, but to my ear people in Alaska pronounce Kuskokwim with the
> stress on the final syllable. Or maybe it is just a secondary stress, I am
> not sure

Growing up in Alaska I acquired an initial stress. This may be
different from the stress actually used by people on the Kuskokwim,
however. Or it may be that Yupʼik people use an initial stress in
English and Athabaskans have a final stress. Dunno. I’ve modified the
English pronunciation to mark both stress points as “optional”. Since
English requires at least a primary stress, I think the transcription
makes it clear that there’s variation between the two.

> As for the genealogy, I doubt that Upper Kuskokwim can be closer to Tutchone
> than to Koyukon, as the tree suggests. UK and Koyukon are really similar. I
> don't know anything about Tutchone, but it should be a lot more different,
> just because of the distance and no contacts for centuries.
>
> I was looking at some of Gary Holton's materials of Tanacross, and it looks
> to me far more distant from UK than Koyukon. However, I heard both from
> Michael Krauss and from native speakers that Lower Tanana is the closest to
> UK. I can neither confirm or refute this, as LT materials are not as
> accessible as Koyukon.

Based on your suggestions I’ve shifted it up a notch from
Tanana-Tutchone to Western, with a note that it is probably
intermediate between the two.

Are there any dialects I should note? A list of settlements where it
was traditionally spoken?

> Next week I will be visiting, for the first time, in the Tlingit country -
> there will be a Russian America conference in Sitka. Is that where you are
> from originally?

Not Sitka, but I’ve spent a lot of time there, even doing “fieldwork”
(it’s hard to use that unironically when working among family). My
hometown is Wrangell, where most of my family still lives, though I
spent the majority of my life in Anchorage. Much of my time off from
school in the winter and summer was in Wrangell with family, but my
father liked to go exploring so we spent a month here in Haines, a
month there in Sitka, and so forth over the years.

Thanks,
James