HAS TLINGIT A GENETIC RELATION TO ATHAPASCAN?
By Pliny Earle Goddard
The question of the possible connection of Tlingit and Athapascan presented itself to Professor Franz Boas, when, during his work on the Northwest coast, the morphological similarities were observed by him[1]. At that time the requisite knowledge of both Athapascan and Tlingit was lacking for a final determination of the question of genetic relationship.
When some years later Dr. John R. Swanton was engaged in field-work on the Northwest coast, he secured Tlingit linguistic material[2] from which a grammatical sketch was prepared for the Handbook of American Languages[3]. The recording of this Tlingit material lacked the phonetic accuracy necessary for a basis of comparison, and the meanings of the stems were not determined with sufficient exactness. Dr. Swanton was aware of the general resemblance of Haida, Tlingit, and Athapascan, but realized the futility of making a prolonged and detailed comparison based on limited and faulty material.
Dr. E. Sapir read a paper at the Philadelphia meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1914, on the Na-dene, a name he chose for a linguistic group composed of Haida, Tlingit, and all the Athapascan languages[4]. Dr. Sapir’s contention was that these three hitherto considered independent stocks were genetically related. The material used for Tlingit was that embodied in Dr. Swanton’s two contributions mentioned above. He drew upon the various sources of Athapascan material, restoring in many instances hypothetical parent-forms with which to make his comparison. The paper, which appeared in the “American Antropologist”, was called preliminary; but the final results of the study have not yet appeared in print.
It was only in the winter of 1914-15 that an opportunity presented itself for a satisfactory examination of Tlingit. Mr. Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit Indian, spent some weeks in New York City, during which time Professor Boas secured rather full material, chiefly in the form of grammatical notes and lists of words. Particular attention was given by Professor Boas and his students to an exact classification and representation of the sounds of Tlingit. With the preparation and publication of this material[5], an opportunity for a profitable comparative study from the side of Tlingit was presented for the first time.
During the years in which a satisfactory knowledge of Tlingit has been awaited, various Athapascan languages have been studied, and bodies of texts and grammatical sketches have been published. The first of these dealing with Hupa contains some regrettable deficiencies in phonetic exactness. There are still large and important groups of Athapascan dialects as yet unstudied or unavailable, due to delay in
- ↑ The relationship of Haida and Tlingit was suggested and discussed in an article, « Classification of the Languages of the North Pacific Coast » (Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology [Chicago, 1893], 339-346).
- ↑ The texts were published in BBae 39 (1909).
- ↑ BBae 40 (pt 1) : 159-204.
- ↑ The Na-dene Languages, a Preliminary Report (AA 17[1915]: 534-559).
- ↑ Franz Boas, Grammatical Notts on the Language of the Tlingit Indians (U. Penn. 8 [1917] : 1-179).
