Talk:Tlingit language

message: Hi.
Just wondering about the voiced stops & affricates. Are these really voiced? Or (like Athabaskan languages) are they really lenis voiceless unaspirated consonants that contrast with aspirated and ejective obstruents?
I havent read about Tlingit. Do the authors here know more about the phonetic realization of these?
Thanks.
— ishwar  (SPEAK) 15:25, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)
:Some (most?) younger speakers voice them under influence from English. Older speakers use unaspirated consonants as in Athabaskan languages. The orthographies represent them as voiced consonants and as such encourage their voicing, so we can expect a complete transition to voiced consonants over the next generation. However I have heard younger speakers use unvoiced unaspirated consonants word-finally, so I think that the two sounds are merging into a single phoneme and may end up varying by position. BTW I have an excellent reference to modern Tlingit phonology which I'll add to the references section this month some time (whenever it shows up via ILL). — Ts'éiyoosh 04:20, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Obstruent voicing?

message: The text says 500 native speakers, while the sidebar lists > 1,200 speakers. Is the sidebar including non-native speakers? (That would seem to go against what's done for most other languages). Or are there different numbers from different sources? A small discrepancy wouldn't be so bad, but these numbers are off by a large amount, so it would be good to stick with the more accurate number if there's a disagreement. Jiashudiwanjin 04:01, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Data from the US Census (through the MLA) is unreliable because of self-reporting issues. Language revitalization enthusiasts often report themselves as speakers of a minority language when in fact they are second language learners with only limited fluency. Also, fluent minority speakers often fail to report this on the US Census. A genuine linguistic speaker survey has yet to be done for the whole population, and the only speaker surveys done recently were in Sitka, Haines, Atlin, and Teslin. Taken together they are too limited for guesstimation. The population numbers have been changed to reflect the last survey estimation done by Michael Krauss in 1995. The actual number now is probably considerably lower as almost all speakers are elderly (only two fluent speakers exist under the age of 60, one in Yakutat and one in Haines.) — 72.235.158.71 23:22, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Actually, that is completely incorrect. For one, I am an individual who has been documented as being fluent. Second of all, thanks to language revitalization efforts, there are now more than that.00:19, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of speakers 

message: I've been researching materials for Fort Tongass and Tongass Island and may yet dare to write Tongass people (without ethnography being my specialty...).  In the websearches I found this interesting page on the Tongass dialect of Tlingit, and figured someone of the linguistics folks here might find it worthwhile to incorporate into the article, or even stub up a separate article.Skookum1 (talk) 15:56, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Considering there are only two native speakers, it isn’t really necessary to incorporate it into the article.Macy Sinrich (talk) 00:15, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Tongass dialect

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Isn't there a rather large lexical category missing from the grammar section?  There's a separate Tlingit noun article, but where is Tlingit verb? — Preceding unsigned comment added by VeryRarelyStable (talk • contribs) 09:57, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Verbs? 

message: I am a native speaker of the language, and the pronunciation is not accurate. Tlingit is pronounced t͡ɬɪ̀nkɪ́tʰ. The pronunciation does not line up correctly to our writing system and phonology. For instance, the phoneme ɬ is always represented as l or L. The phoneme tɬ is always represented as tl or dl, depending on the context. Next we have the letter “i” which always represents the vowel ɪ. Macy Sinrich (talk) 00:07, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The transcription is sourced to Maddieson et al. (2001), who say,  (p. 136). Nardog (talk) 02:09, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

text: As for the vowels, they say  (p. 141). So the use of  is defensible from a phonological standpoint, though for the sake of consistency with the body of the article  may indeed be more appropriate. Nardog (talk) 02:14, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: We write the name either as Tlingit or Lingít. I can find many sources that say that  is “i”. Am I able to connect a source and change the i to ɪ? Macy Sinrich (talk) 16:15, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The transcription is preceded by the native name "Lingít". If the pronunciation starting with the lateral affricate is also used in Tlingit to refer to the language itself, you have to provide a source for that. In the meantime, I'll replace  with  because that is consistent with the source cited and with the body of the article. Nardog (talk) 13:48, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

text:  Please do not modify other people's comments. And "et al." means "and others", so "say" is correct. Nardog (talk) 13:53, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: The article text includes:
(khu-ÿu-ÿa-t'áa, INDH.OBJ-PERF-(0, -D, +I)-hot)
I have not been able to either guess or remember or find the meaning of INDH in a linguistic context; for example, it is not included in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations.
Could the "H" be spurious, and could "IND.OBJ" be intended?Redav (talk) 15:34, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: This is just an inspired guess, but the table in "Pronominals" has a row "INDEFINITE HUMAN". It's a pity that so much information here is unsourced and thus hard to verify. I trust that it is valid, but this presentation is highly problematic. –Austronesier (talk) 15:47, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: After reading on in the article, I encountered the term "INDEFINITE HUMAN". Supposedly, that is what is meant by "INDH". If so, it - together with a similar coding for "INDEFINITE NON-HUMAN" - may deserve being entered into the list on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations, with a proper citation provided by someone knowledgeable.Redav (talk) 15:51, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Since you deduced the same thing as I did and, moreover, since INDH and INDN are described in one of the external links (A Grammar of the Tlingit Language), I thought I'd just add them to the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations myself.Redav (talk) 16:33, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  INDH or just IND? 

message: "Tlingit has a complex phonological system, compared to Indo-European languages such as English or Spanish."
Is it really compared to Indo-European languages by someone? There is no citation, and although I'm aware that this is very subjective, for me it looks much more similar to Northeast Caucasian languages like Avar and Lezgian. I personally don't see anything Indo-European-like about Tlingit's phonology. 
185.51.250.252 (talk) 20:36, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the point made here is something like: "much more complex than these two Indo-European languages" that many readers of enWP are familiar with. It is not unusual to find intros about the Pacific NW linguistic area which mention the more than average phonological complexity of these languages, using widely known IE languages such as English or Spanish as point of reference. I'll try to look for a source and a better way to put it. –Austronesier (talk) 21:36, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonology 

message: Can we add a sample passage in the Tlingit language, for example the Lord's Prayer, which we have in the Tongva language article? 2605:A000:FFC0:5F:F9BD:9D:B97C:57D4 (talk) 01:58, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for sample passage in the Tlingit language