Tlingit alphabet
Encyclopedia
The Tlingit language
has been recorded in a number of orthographies over the two hundred years since European contact. The first transcriptions of Tlingit were done by Russian Orthodox
ministers, hence they were in the Cyrillic script. A hiatus in writing Tlingit occurred subsequent to the purchase of Alaska by the United States due to the policies implemented by Presbyterian reverend and territorial educational commissioner Sheldon Jackson
, who believed that the use of indigenous languages should be suppressed in favor of English. American and German anthropologists
began recording Tlingit in various linguistic transcriptions
from the 1890s onward, and there exists a small body of literature and a large amount of vocabulary recorded in these transcriptions. With the work of two linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics
, Gillian Story and Constance Naish, the first “complete” orthography for Tlingit began to spread in the 1960s. This orthography, now somewhat modified by native hands, is the most common orthography in use today. In the 1980s Jeff Leer and the Yukon Native Language Center developed another orthography for writing Interior Tlingit. Since the spread of e-mail
among the Tlingit population a new orthography has developed by consensus, based on the Naish-Story orthography but adapted to the restrictions of plain text encodings such as ISO 8859-1.
Given the extension of the Cyrillic script to deal with the phonemic systems found in Central Asian and Siberian languages, it is easy to construct a modern Cyrillic alphabet to fully represent Tlingit. This has been done at least once, but the population familiar with both the Cyrillic script and the Tlingit language is rather small, thus no such script is likely to find serious use.
tradition, one used by Boas himself in his rudimentary Tlingit grammar published in 1917. The other most widespread transcriptions were the one used extensively by John Swanton in his Tlingit Myths and Texts and The Tlingit Language, and the one used by Frederica de Laguna
in her Story of a Tlingit Village and Under Mount Saint Elias.
The recent publication of George T. Emmons
's The Tlingit Indians was heavily edited by De Laguna and subsequently uses her transcription system. Emmons himself did not use any regular transcription when writing Tlingit words and phrases, despite requests from anthropologists of the day. His idiosyncratic and inconsistent recordings of Tlingit were mostly translated by De Laguna into her transcription, but a number of words and phrases he wrote down continue to puzzle linguists and Tlingit speakers alike.
of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia
.
in the 1990s. It is essentially an adaptation of the American system to the limitations of plain text
encodings such as ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252
. Since the acute accent
is readily available on most computers due to its use in a number of widespread European languages, it continues to be used to mark high tone in the email orthography. However, since there is no underscore diacritic
available, the e-mail orthography represents the uvular consonants with a digraph of the velar consonant plus h in the same manner as in the Canadian orthography. This system is relatively easy to input on a computer using an extended US keyboard with support for the acute accent. It has begun to see use in Tlingit writing for signs, regalia, posters, and newsletters, despite its unofficial status. Since it requires no extraneous formatting hacks, this orthography is the one used in all Wikipedia articles containing Tlingit text.
equivalents. Note that certain unaspirated consonants are pronounced as voiced by some younger and second language speakers, the IPA equivalents for these voiced consonants are given in parentheses. In addition, there are a few phonemes which are geographically or historically restricted in modern Tlingit. For example, Canadian speakers often make use of m where most other speakers would have w. The character usually given as ÿ has died out within the last generation of speakers, becoming one of y or w depending on position. The three major orthographies optionally allow for the representation of all of these phonemes in Tlingit writing.
Tlingit language
The Tlingit language ) is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada. It is a branch of the Na-Dené language family. Tlingit is very endangered, with fewer than 140 native speakers still living, all of whom are bilingual or near-bilingual in English...
has been recorded in a number of orthographies over the two hundred years since European contact. The first transcriptions of Tlingit were done by Russian Orthodox
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
ministers, hence they were in the Cyrillic script. A hiatus in writing Tlingit occurred subsequent to the purchase of Alaska by the United States due to the policies implemented by Presbyterian reverend and territorial educational commissioner Sheldon Jackson
Sheldon Jackson
Sheldon Jackson was a Presbyterian missionary who also became a political leader. During this career he travelled about 1 million miles and established over 100 missions and churches in the Western United States. He is best remembered for his extensive work during the final quarter of the 19th...
, who believed that the use of indigenous languages should be suppressed in favor of English. American and German anthropologists
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
began recording Tlingit in various linguistic transcriptions
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...
from the 1890s onward, and there exists a small body of literature and a large amount of vocabulary recorded in these transcriptions. With the work of two linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics
SIL International
SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...
, Gillian Story and Constance Naish, the first “complete” orthography for Tlingit began to spread in the 1960s. This orthography, now somewhat modified by native hands, is the most common orthography in use today. In the 1980s Jeff Leer and the Yukon Native Language Center developed another orthography for writing Interior Tlingit. Since the spread of e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
among the Tlingit population a new orthography has developed by consensus, based on the Naish-Story orthography but adapted to the restrictions of plain text encodings such as ISO 8859-1.
Cyrillic alphabets
An example of the Cyrillic Tlingit alphabet can be found in the text Indication of the Pathway into the Kingdom of Heaven (Russian Указаніе пути въ Царствіе Небесное, Tlingit-Cyrillic Ка-вак-шіи ев-у-ту-ци-ни-и дте Тики Ан-ка-у хан-те), written by the priest John Veniaminov in 1901. This orthography does not have a one-to-one correspondence with Tlingit phonemes nor does it record tone, but a Tlingit speaker familiar with the Cyrillic script can puzzle out the proper pronunciations without too much difficulty.Given the extension of the Cyrillic script to deal with the phonemic systems found in Central Asian and Siberian languages, it is easy to construct a modern Cyrillic alphabet to fully represent Tlingit. This has been done at least once, but the population familiar with both the Cyrillic script and the Tlingit language is rather small, thus no such script is likely to find serious use.
Linguistic transcriptions
With the flowering of American anthropology and the focus on the Northwest Coast came a number of linguistic transcriptions of Tlingit. Most were constructed in the BoasianFranz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
tradition, one used by Boas himself in his rudimentary Tlingit grammar published in 1917. The other most widespread transcriptions were the one used extensively by John Swanton in his Tlingit Myths and Texts and The Tlingit Language, and the one used by Frederica de Laguna
Frederica de Laguna
Frederica de Laguna was an American anthropologist. Her parents, Theodore Lopez de Leo de Laguna and Grace Mead Andrus, were, respectively, Spanish-American and, in Frederica's own words, "Connecticut Yankee". Both received doctorates from Cornell and would later teach philosophy at Bryn...
in her Story of a Tlingit Village and Under Mount Saint Elias.
The recent publication of George T. Emmons
George T. Emmons
George Thornton Emmons was an ethnographic photographer and a U.S. Navy Lieutenant.He was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was George Foster Emmons....
's The Tlingit Indians was heavily edited by De Laguna and subsequently uses her transcription system. Emmons himself did not use any regular transcription when writing Tlingit words and phrases, despite requests from anthropologists of the day. His idiosyncratic and inconsistent recordings of Tlingit were mostly translated by De Laguna into her transcription, but a number of words and phrases he wrote down continue to puzzle linguists and Tlingit speakers alike.
The Naish-Story orthography
Constance Naish and Gillian Story developed their orthography for use in their Bible translations and related works. Because this was the first system that could accurately represent all the Tlingit phonemes, and due to the pair's emphasis on native literacy, the Naish-Story system became very widespread within a few years of its introduction.The modified Naish-Story orthography
Naish and Story modified their system for the publication of their Tlingit Verb Dictionary.The American orthography
The American orthography, so called because of its use in Southeast Alaska in contrast to the system used in Canada, is the current incarnation of the Naish-Story system, which underwent some sporadic modification during the two decades following its introduction. It continues to represent the uvular consonants with the underscore diacritic, but drops the grave accent in favor of unmarked low tone. (The grave accent can still be used to discriminate tonal emphasis as well as the additional tones of Southern Tlingit.) It retains the single graphs for short vowels and English-based digraphs for long vowels.The Canadian orthography
The “Canadian” orthography was developed at the Yukon Native Language Center in the 1980s. It features intentional similarities to the orthographies used in Athabaskan languagesAthabaskan languages
Athabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
.
The e-mail orthography
The e-mail orthography developed informally with the increasing use of e-mailE-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
in the 1990s. It is essentially an adaptation of the American system to the limitations of plain text
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....
encodings such as ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
. Since the acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
is readily available on most computers due to its use in a number of widespread European languages, it continues to be used to mark high tone in the email orthography. However, since there is no underscore diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
available, the e-mail orthography represents the uvular consonants with a digraph of the velar consonant plus h in the same manner as in the Canadian orthography. This system is relatively easy to input on a computer using an extended US keyboard with support for the acute accent. It has begun to see use in Tlingit writing for signs, regalia, posters, and newsletters, despite its unofficial status. Since it requires no extraneous formatting hacks, this orthography is the one used in all Wikipedia articles containing Tlingit text.
Comparison table
The table below gives side-by-side comparisons of the three major orthographies (e-mail, American, and Canadian) along with their IPAInternational Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
equivalents. Note that certain unaspirated consonants are pronounced as voiced by some younger and second language speakers, the IPA equivalents for these voiced consonants are given in parentheses. In addition, there are a few phonemes which are geographically or historically restricted in modern Tlingit. For example, Canadian speakers often make use of m where most other speakers would have w. The character usually given as ÿ has died out within the last generation of speakers, becoming one of y or w depending on position. The three major orthographies optionally allow for the representation of all of these phonemes in Tlingit writing.
| Am. | Can. | IPA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | a | a | ʌ |
| á | á | á | ʌ́ |
| aa | aa | à | a |
| áa | áa | â | á |
| ch | ch | ch | tʃʰ (tʃ) |
| ch' | ch' | ch' | tʃʼ |
| d | d | d | t (d) |
| dl | dl | dł | tɬ (dl) |
| dz | dz | dz | ts (dz) |
| e | e | e | ɛ |
| é | é | é | ɛ́ |
| ee | ee | ì | i |
| ée | ée | î | í |
| ei | ei | è | e |
| éi | éi | ê | é |
| g | g | g | k (ɡ) |
| gw | gw | gw | kʷ (ɡʷ) |
| gh | g̲ | gh | q (ɢ) |
| ghw | g̲w | ghw | qʷ (ɢʷ) |
| h | h | h | h |
| i | i | i | ɪ |
| í | í | í | ɪ́ |
| j | j | j | tʃ (dʒ) |
| k | k | k | kʰ |
| kw | kw | kw | kʷʰ |
| k' | k' | k' | kʼ |
| k'w | k'w | k'w | kʷʼ |
| kh | k̲ | kh | qʰ |
| khw | k̲w | khw | qʷʰ |
| kh' | k̲' | kh' | qʼ |
| kh'w | k̲'w | kh'w | qʷʼ |
| l | l | ł | ɬ |
| l' | l' | ł' | ɬʼ |
| (ll) | (l̲) | l | l |
| (m) | (m) | m | m |
| n | n | n | n |
| (o) | (o) | (o) | o |
| oo | oo | ù | u |
| óo | óo | û | ú |
| s | s | s | s |
| s' | s' | s' | sʼ |
| sh | sh | sh | ʃ |
| t | t | t | tʰ |
| t' | t' | t' | tʼ |
| tl | tl | tl | tɬʰ |
| tl' | tl' | tl' | tɬʼ |
| ts | ts | ts | tsʰ |
| ts' | ts' | ts' | tsʼ |
| u | u | u | ʊ |
| ú | ú | ú | ʊ́ |
| w | w | w | w |
| x | x | x | x |
| xw | xw | xw | xʷ |
| x' | x' | x' | xʼ |
| x'w | x'w | x'w | xʷʼ |
| xh | x̲ | xh | χ |
| xhw | x̲w | xhw | χʷ |
| xh' | x̲' | xh' | χʼ |
| xh'w | x̲'w | xh'w | χʷʼ |
| y | y | y | j |
| (ÿ) | (ÿ/y̲) | (ÿ) | ɰ |
| . | . | . | ʔ |