Updates to Athabaskan notes

Sun Jan 2 10:30:36 UTC 2011

Thanks James for responding, it clears up a number of loose ends for me. I
think there are two different issues with the Athapaskan listing and the
relation to Ethnologue. 1) What to list, a preliminary, ad hoc, cum grano
salis list of normed varieties, varieties with a name in the literature,
dialects, languages etc? I don't have any advice for you here that you are
not already well aware of. 2) How whatever you lost corresponds to that of
the Ethnologue. In many (but not all) cases it is possible to determine what
Ethnologue code a variety corresponds to. For example, if we take Sapir to
be right in that Chasta Costa and Tututni are mutually intelligible,
then it follows that Chasta Costa falls under the Tututni ethnologue-code,
since those codes intend to group varieties which are mutually intelligible
into the same code (as per the Ethnologue introduction). Suppose in some
other case that the Ethnologue
is wrong according to its own intention and groups A and B that are not, in
reality, mutually intelligible into a code xxx. Then in a listing of A and
B, both A and B still correspond to xxx of the Ethnologue. all the best, H

2010/12/29 James Crippen <jcrippen at gmail.com>

> 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 obviously based on outdated information from older sources.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
>
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