Updates to Athabaskan notes

[James Crippen]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:23, Harald Hammarström
<h.hammarstrom at let.ru.nl> wrote:
> I am writing a review of the 16th ed of the ethnologue

As a note to the general Athabaskanist public, we need to write to the
Ethnologue editors more. Their stuff on Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit is
obviously based on outdated information from older sources. Instead of
scoffing we should be feeding them more reliable data.

> 1.
> †Middle Tanana [—] {MTa} (Eng. /ˈmɪdl̩ ˈtænənɑ/): Salcha-Goodpaster
>
> The Salcha-Goodpaster dialect of Tanana is argued to be a separate language
> by James Kari. It collapsed PA *ts and *tsʳ to ts, unlike Minto-Nenana but
> like Chena.
>
> Is there are reference as to where Kari argues this?

There is a bit on the Alaska Native Language Center website about the
problem. I don’t know if it’s been discussed in any academic
publications, but I’d appreciate a reference myself if so.

http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/anlmap/

> 2.
> †Taku [—] {Tak} (Eng. /tɑˈku/, Tli /tʼaːqʰúˑ/): Tahko-tinneh
> Atlin BC?
>
> Has the Takho-tinneh vocabulary been published somewhere?

Pilling (1885: 762) lists “3876. Tolmie, Dr. William Fraser.
Vocabulary of the Tahko Tinneh language. Manuscript. 1 l. folio, 60
words. These manuscripts are in the library of the Bureau of
Ethnology.” I have yet to see this, nor do I know where it might be
today.

Dall (1877: 40) lists “Tāhko-tinneh” below the “Dāho-tena” who are the
Sekani (“sometimes called the Sicanees by the traders” p. 33), and
above his ““Chilkaht-tena””. The latter are either the Tagish under a
Tlingit name, hence Dall’s scare quotes. Dall (1877: 33) says “Tāh′ko
Tin′neh. = Tahko-tinneh of some of the traders. Inhabit the basin of
the Lewis River; are very few in number, and scarcely known to the
whites.”

All we really know about Taku Athabaskan is educated guesses based on
knowledge about Tagish, Tahltan, and Tlingit. The page on Taku gives a
few more details about the problem, but I haven’t had much time to
work on it lately. It’s quite likely that there was no distinct
language, instead just a dialect of Tagish or less likely Tahltan
before Tlingit assimilation was complete. I have listed it for
completeness after some discussion with Mike Krauss about it.

> 3. †Nicola  [—] {Nic} (Eng. /nɪˈkolə/): Thompson Athabaskan
>
> Is there a reference to data on this variety?

I didn’t list this, but I should have. Sorry.

Boas, Franz. 1924. Vocabulary of the Athapascan Tribe of Nicola
Valley, British Columbia. IJAL 3(1): 36–38.

Krauss 1977 (the fricatives paper) also mentions it in passing. In
Krauss 1979/2005 (the tone paper) he says “the Nicola data are too few
and too wretched to permit any determinations of tone, or of any
specific relations on purely linguistic grounds” (p. 115). I think
Krauss collected some materials on it which are available in the
Alaska Native Language Archive, but there’s nothing in the online
catalog because it doesn’t list the resources available for
non-Alaskan languages (hint hint!).

The Nicola people are known to the Nlakaʼpamux (Thompson) people who
speak an Interior Salish language. They have oral histories of warring
with the Nicola and eventually enslaving and/or assimilating them,
according to a couple of linguists I know who have worked in the area.
Basically the same thing happened to them as what happened to the
Tsetsaut. I have no idea if anything has been published about that
oral history, and probably they don’t really want to talk about it
much with the general public. There are apparently some folks in the
region who still identify as Nicola, but anyone speaking an indigenous
language there recently has been speaking a Salishan language, not
Athabaskan.

> 4.
>
> †Chasta Costa [—] {CCo} (Eng. /ˈʃæstə ˈkɑstə/): Rogue River Athabaskan,
> Shasta Costa
>
> Rogue River Gorge
>
> But Sapir (p 272) says that Chasta Costa was practically the same as Tututni
> (and certainly seems to imply mutual intelligibility).

Under the higher heading “Coquille-Tututni” I say “possibly a single
language”. Thus all of Coquille, Kwatami, Tututni, and Chasta Costa
may be a single language. Sapir was probably right, but I don’t know
if anyone has actually done the real comparative work necessary to
show this.

> Is there a particular reason to consider Chasta Costa not to fall under the
> tututni code?

You have opened a can of writhing and wriggling worms. :) The concept
of “dialect” versus “langauge” is especially fuzzy in the Athabaskan
family because of long histories of contact between different groups
and the resulting diffusion and other contact effects.

I have listed Chasta Costa as distinct mostly for continuity with
published materials. Compare for example the “Slave” heading which has
underneath it “Slave”, “Mountain”, “Bearlake”, and “Hare”. The
Ethnologue lumps together the latter three as “Northern Slavey” and
the former as “Southern Slavey”, as apparently does the Northwest
Territories government. Keren Rice in her grammar on the other hand
has grouped them all together as a single “Slavey” language with
“Slave” being one dialect. Yet she still refers to each distinctively
throughout her grammar. The point here is that these may or may not be
separate languages depending on who you ask, but because they have
been *referred* to as separate languages frequently enough, for
continuity with existing publications I have listed them as distinct
languages. In doing so I am capturing the habits of the many
Athabaskanists who use the names distinctively, regardless of
language/dialect status. In Oregon and California the combination of
rugged topography and small size of groups has exacerbated the
proliferation of distinctions.

In comparative literature people will routinely cite data from
different speech communities which they suspect to be dialects of the
same language. So Krauss has referred to “Hagwilget” versus “Babine”
when they are really two dialects Witsuwitʼen and Uʼin Witʼen of what
is the same language known generally as Babine-Witsuwitʼen. The fact
that the two dialects have somewhat different phoneme inventories may
be significant for historical work, one dialect may preserve things
that the other has lost. They may still be a single language by any
other measure, however. So in historical and comparative literature it
can still be important to refer to two dialects separately, even
though they may actually be a single language by any other criterion.

I have done only a cursory review of the Pacific Coast Athabaskan
literature, and I have mostly relied on the input of people better
versed with the situation than myself. Also there has not been much
published work on historical comparisons of PCA anyway, and I am not
about to do the work myself, there are several other people much
better qualified to do so. As we learn more publicly about these
languages I expect the groupings to change.

Finally, I’ve stated in the introduction that “this organization
should be taken cum grano salis”. There’s still lots of work to be
done in actually comparing different languages and working out how
they’re related. The organization I’ve used, originally from Keren
Rice, is largely based on geography, with true genealogical
relationships only holding at the lowest levels. We really still know
very little about how specific Athabaskan languages are related to
each other, and there is not really much work being done in this area
simply because there aren’t that many people working on Athabaskan
languages.

Cheers,
James