57-639: Castle Hill ( Tlingit : Noow Tlein , Russian : Замковый холм ) also known as the American Flag-Raising Site and now as the Baranof Castle State Historic Site , is a National Historic Landmark and state park in Sitka, Alaska . The hill, providing a commanding view over the city, is the historical site of Tlingit and Russian forts, and the location where Russian Alaska was formally handed over to
114-416: A circumflex , and long low vowels are marked with a grave accent. Short low vowels are unmarked. Coastal Tlingit <áa> and <aa> are Inland <â> and <à> respectively. Coastal <éi> and <ei> are Inland <ê> and <è>, Coastal <ée> and <ee> are Inland <î> and <ì>, and Coastal <óo> and <oo> are Inland <û> and <ù>. Word onset
171-480: A center of US government administration until the building burned. In 1898 the hill was transferred to the United States Department of Agriculture , which built a structure on the hill which served as its Alaska headquarters until 1932. This building was then used for a variety of commercial purposes before it was demolished in 1955. The site was then designated a territorial park. When Alaska
228-514: A display of six cannons and a flagpole. The property is now administered as part of the Alaska state park system. Tlingit language The Tlingit language ( English: / ˈ k l ɪ ŋ k ɪ t / KLING -kit ; Lingít Tlingit pronunciation: [ɬɪ̀nkɪ́tʰ] ) is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada and is a branch of
285-497: A distinct and separate branch of Na-Dene, an indigenous language family of North America . Edward Sapir (1915) argued for its inclusion in the Na-Dené family, a claim that was subsequently debated by Franz Boas (1917), P.E. Goddard (1920), and many other prominent linguists of the time. Studies in the late 20th century by (Heinz-)Jürgen Pinnow (1962, 1968, 1970, int. al.) and Michael E. Krauss (1964, 1965, 1969, int. al.) showed
342-406: A four-way register contrast between short, long, glottalized, and "fading" vowels. (In the last type, the onset of the vowel is articulated normally but the release is murmured , essentially a rapid opening of the glottis once articulation is begun.) The tone values in two-tone dialects can be predicted in some cases from the three-tone values but not the reverse. Earlier, it was hypothesized that
399-585: A leading figure in the Russian-American Company , arrived in the Sitka area in 1795, and sought to establish a trading post on the hill. He ended up establishing Redoubt St. Archangel Michael several miles away in 1799; this trading post was destroyed by the Tlingit in 1802. Baranov returned to Sitka in force in 1804, seized Castle Hill, from which the outnumbered Tlingit had withdrawn. After
456-456: A modern work postdating Naish and Story's work in the 1960s. Southeast Alaska 57°34′48″N 135°29′14″W / 57.58000°N 135.48722°W / 57.58000; -135.48722 Southeast Alaska , often abbreviated to southeast or southeastern , and sometimes called the Alaska ( n ) panhandle , is the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of Alaska , bordered to
513-425: A similar distinction. For speakers who make the voiced/unvoiced distinction, the distribution is symmetrical with the unaspirated/aspirated distinction among other speakers. Maddieson , Smith, and Bessel (2001) note that all word final non-ejective stops are phonemically unaspirated. That contrasts with the orthography that typically represents them as aspirated stops: t [tʰ] for the more accurate d [t] . There
570-426: A single phoneme word-finally. Maddieson and colleagues also confirm that the ejective fricatives in Tlingit are in fact true ejectives, despite the widely-held assumption that ejective fricatives are not actually phonetically ejective but are as a sequence of fricative and glottal stop. In Tlingit, at least, the articulation of ejective fricatives includes complete closure of the glottis before frication begins, and
627-587: A strong connection to Eyak and hence to the Athabaskan languages . Sapir initially proposed a connection between Tlingit and Haida , but the debate over Na-Dene gradually excluded Haida from the discussion. Haida is now considered an isolate , with some borrowing from its long proximity with Tlingit. In 2004, the Haida linguist John Enrico presented new arguments and reopened the debate. Victor Golla writes in his 2011 California Native Languages , "John Enrico,
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#1732782877710684-735: A tourism agency in 1947 under the name Arctic Alaska Tours which was renamed Westours, which originally arranged trips for travelers on steamships. The border between Alaska and the Canadian province of British Columbia was the subject of the Alaska boundary dispute , where the United States and the United Kingdom claimed different borderlines at the Alaskan panhandle. While the British foreign affairs were in favor of support of
741-478: Is a generally flat area about 120 feet (37 m) in length and 90 feet (27 m) in width. The south face of the hill is sheer, while the eastern face presents a more gradual slope. An accessible trail, with interpretive panels, provides access to the now-bare summit area. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the area, Castle Hill was occupied by families of the Kiksadi clan of Tlingits . Alexander Baranov ,
798-480: Is a wide variation in ordinary speech, ranging from unreleased [t̚] to a very delayed aspiration [tːʰ] . However, the underlying phoneme is certainly unaspirated /t/ since it is consistently produced when the word is suffixed. The orthography usually but not always reflects that: hít "house" is written (du) hídi "(his) house" when marked with the possessive suffix -ÿí . It is possible but has not been verified that aspirated and unaspirated stops are collapsed into
855-618: Is always consonantal in Tlingit and so words never begin with a vowel. Where a vowel would theoretically have occurred, such as by prefixing or compounding, the vowel is always followed by either [ʔ] or [j] . The former is universal in single words, and both are found in word-medial position in compounds. The orthography does not reflect the [ʔ] in word-initial position, but either . or y may be seen in medial position. For example: khu- INDH . OBJ - ÿu- PERF - ÿa- ( 0 , - D , +I)- t'áa hot khu- ÿu- ÿa- t'áa INDH .OBJ- PERF- {(0, -D, +I)}- hot "the weather
912-616: Is based in Craig, Alaska . Debates over whether to expand logging in the federally owned Tongass are not uncommon. Mining remains important in the northern area with the Juneau mining district and Admiralty mining district hosting active mines as of 2015. Gold was discovered in 1880 and played an important part in the early history of the region. In the 2010s, mines increasingly began to be explored and eventually completed in neighboring British Columbia , upstream of important rivers such as
969-491: Is by far the largest air carrier in the region, with Juneau's Juneau International Airport serving as the aerial hub for all of southeast, and Ketchikan's Ketchikan International Airport serving as a secondary hub for southern southeast Alaska. Alaska's bush airlines and air taxis serve many of the smaller and more isolated communities and villages in the regions. Many communities are accessible by air only by floatplane , as proper runways are often difficult to construct on
1026-405: Is hot" Unknown glossing abbreviation(s) ( help ); But when the perfective prefix ÿu- is word-initial, the glottal stop appears to ensure that the word begins with a consonant. ∅- 3 . NEU . OBJ - ÿu- PERF - ÿa- ( 0 , - D , +I)- t'áa hot ∅- ÿu- ÿa- t'áa 3. NEU .OBJ- PERF- {(0, -D, +I)}- hot "it is hot" Unknown glossing abbreviation(s) ( help ); Until
1083-475: Is in contradistinction to the glottal modifications in Tongass Tlingit, which Leer argues are symmetric with the modifications of the consonantal system. Thus, a fading vowel V̤ is symmetric with an aspirated consonant Cʰ , and a glottalized vowel Vʔ is symmetric with an ejective (glottalized) consonant Cʼ . That implies that the two systems have no familial relationship. Leer (1978) speculated that
1140-778: Is noted for its scenery and mild, rainy climate . The largest cities in the region are Juneau , Sitka , and Ketchikan . This region is also home to Hyder , the easternmost town in Alaska. Southeast Alaska has a land area of 35,138 square miles (91,010 km ), comprising much of the Alexander Archipelago . The largest islands are, from North to South, Chichagof Island , Admiralty Island , Baranof Island , Kupreanof Island , Revillagigedo Island and Prince of Wales Island . Major bodies of water of southeast Alaska include Glacier Bay , Lynn Canal , Icy Strait , Chatham Strait , Stephens Passage , Frederick Sound , Sumner Strait , and Clarence Strait . The archipelago
1197-591: Is the most conservative of the various dialects of Tlingit, preserving contrasts which have been lost in the other dialects. The fading and glottalized vowels in Tongass Tlingit have also been compared with similar systems in the Coast Tsimshian dialect . However, Krauss and Leer (1981, p. 165) point out that the fading vowels in Coastal Tsimshian are the surface realization of underlying sequences of vowel and glottalized sonorant, VʔC . That
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#17327828777101254-677: Is the northern terminus of the Inside Passage , a protected waterway of convoluted passages between islands and fjords, beginning in Puget Sound in Washington state. This was an important travel corridor for Tlingit , Haida , and Tsimshian Native peoples, as well as gold-rush era steamships. In modern times it is an important route for Alaska Marine Highway ferries as well as cruise ships . Southeast Alaska includes seven entire boroughs and two census areas , in addition to
1311-656: Is the sixth largest national park in the United States . On August 20, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt established the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve, which formed the heart of the Tongass National Forest that covers most of the region. The climate of southeast Alaska is dominated by a mid-latitude oceanic climate ( Köppen Cfb ) in the south, an oceanic, marine sub-polar climate ( Köppen Cfc ) in
1368-411: Is uncertain whether this assimilation is autochthonous or if it arose from contact with English, but the former is more likely from a purely articulatory perspective. Young speakers and second-language learners are increasingly making a voiced/unvoiced distinction between consonants, rather than the traditional unaspirated/aspirated distinction. That is because of the influence of English, which makes
1425-525: The Alaska Purchase , English-speaking missionaries from the United States developed a written version of the language with the Latin alphabet . The history of Tlingit is poorly known, mostly because there is no written record until the first contact with Europeans around the 1790s. Documentation was sparse and irregular until the early 20th century. The language appears to have spread northward from
1482-691: The Ketchikan – Saxman area towards the Chilkat region since certain conservative features are reduced gradually from south to north. The shared features between the Eyak language , found around the Copper River delta, and Tongass Tlingit , near the Portland Canal , are all the more striking for the distances that separate them, both geographic and linguistic. Tlingit is currently classified as
1539-767: The Na-Dene language family . Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast Alaska to revive and preserve the Tlingit language and culture. Missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church were the first to develop a written version of Tlingit by using the Cyrillic script to record and translate it when the Russian Empire had contact with Alaska and the coast of North America down to Sonoma County, California . After
1596-721: The Pacific temperate rain forest zone, as classified by the World Wildlife Fund 's ecoregion system, which extends from northern California to Prince William Sound . The most common tree species are sitka spruce and western hemlock . Wildlife includes brown bears , black bears , endemic Alexander Archipelago wolf packs, Sitka black-tailed deer , humpback whales , orcas , five species of salmon , bald eagles , harlequin ducks , scoters , and marbled murrelets . The Ecological Atlas of Southeast Alaska , published by Audubon Alaska in 2016, offers an overview of
1653-473: The University of Alaska Southeast . In April 2014, Alaska HB 216 recognized Tlingit as an official language of Alaska, lending support to language revitalization . Tlingit is divided into roughly five major dialects, all of which are essentially mutually intelligible: The various dialects of Tlingit can be classified roughly into two-tone and three-tone systems. Tongass Tlingit, however, has no tone but
1710-746: The Unuk and the Stikine , which became known as the transboundary mining issue. In 2014, the dam breach at the Mount Polley mine focused attention on the issue, and an agreement between Canada and Alaska was drafted in 2015. The proposed Kerr Sulphurets Mitchell exploration is upstream of the Unuk. Mines upstream of the Stikine include the Red Chris, which is owned by the same company (Imperial Metals) as
1767-415: The velar and uvular plosives is common among Tlingit-speakers of all dialects. For example, the sequence ng ( /nk/ ) is often heard as [ŋk] and ngh ( /nq/ ) as [ɴq] . Native speakers in a teaching position may admonish learners when they produce these assimilated forms, deriding them as "not Tlingit" or "too English", but it is common to later hear such speakers producing those forms themselves. It
Castle Hill (Sitka, Alaska) - Misplaced Pages Continue
1824-449: The 1960s after cruise ship entrepreneur Stanley B. McDonald repurposed a transport ship named Princess Pat, founding Princess Cruises to do leisure cruises which expanded into southeast Alaska by 1969. The TV series The Love Boat was set on a Princess cruise and featured episodes in Alaska; it also helped to popularize cruising generally which helped it grow rapidly between 1977 and 1987. Prior to Princess cruises, Chuck West created
1881-485: The Canadian argument, the event resulted in what was thought of as a betrayal, leading to alienation of the British from the new nation of Canada . Due to the extremely rugged, mountainous nature of Southeastern Alaska, almost all communities (with the exception of Hyder , Skagway , and Haines ) have no road connections outside of their locale, so aircraft and boats are the major means of transport. The Alaska Marine Highway passes through this region. Alaska Airlines
1938-604: The Mount Polley mine. Major hospitals include Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau and PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center in Ketchikan. Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium runs healthcare facilities across 27 communities as of 2022, including hospitals in Sitka and Wrangell; although it originally served Native Americans only, it has expanded access and combined with other local facilities over time. Due to
1995-601: The Northern dialect, the dominant spoken dialect of Tlingit and the standard for written Tlingit, every vowel may take either high or low tone ; in the orthography high tone is indicated by an acute accent ( áa ) and low tone is unmarked ( aa ). The Southern and Transitional dialects have a mid tone which is unmarked and additional low tone which is marked by a grave accent ( àa ). The Inland Tlingit orthography does not use vowel digraphs. Instead, short high vowels are marked with an acute accent, long high vowels are marked with
2052-485: The Tlingit ejective series is [ʃʼ] . The language is also notable for having several laterals but no voiced [l] and for having no labials in most dialects, except for [m] and [p] in recent English loanwords . The consonants in the table are given in the IPA, with the popular orthography equivalents in brackets. Marginal or historical phonemes are given in parentheses. Nasal consonants assimilating with /n/ and
2109-410: The United States in 1867. It is also where the 49-star United States flag was first flown after Alaska became a state in 1959. Castle Hill is a rock outcrop, about 60 feet (18 m) in height. It occupies a prominent position on the edge of Sitka Harbor, although it is now set back from the sea by several hundred feet due to fill added around its southern and western faces in 1968. The summit area
2166-569: The area where the Tlingit language is endemic is contained within the modern borders of Alaska . The exception is an area known as "Inland Tlingit" that extends up the Taku River and into northern British Columbia and the Yukon around Atlin Lake ( Áa Tleen "Big Lake") and Teslin Lake ( Desleen < Tas Tleen "Big Thread") lake districts, as well as a concentration around Bennett Lake at
2223-473: The central region around Juneau , and a subarctic climate ( Köppen Dfc ) to the far northwest and the interior highlands of the archipelago. Southeast Alaska is also the only region in Alaska where the average daytime high temperature is above freezing during the winter months, except for in the southern parts of the Aleutian islands such as Unalaska . Southeast Alaska is a temperate rain forest within
2280-607: The contemporary linguist with the deepest knowledge of Haida, continues to believe that a real, if distant, genetic relationship connects Haida to Na-Dene[.]" The Tlingit language is distributed from near the mouth of the Copper River down the open coast of the Gulf of Alaska and throughout almost all of the islands of the Alexander Archipelago in Southeast Alaska . It is characterized by four or five distinct dialects, but they are mostly mutually intelligible. Almost all of
2337-571: The cruise ship industry). Logging has been an important industry in the past, but has been steadily declining with competition from other areas and the closure of the region's major pulp mills; the Alaska Forest Association described the situation as "desperate" in 2011. Its members include Alcan Forest Products (owned by Canadian Transpac Group, one of the top 5 log exporters in North America ) and Viking Lumber, which
Castle Hill (Sitka, Alaska) - Misplaced Pages Continue
2394-443: The diameter of the air column and so further increases pressure. That pharyngeal constriction is not true pharyngealization, however, since the diameter is still greater than what is found in pharyngealized consonants in other languages. Tlingit has eight vowels , four vowels further distinguished formally by length . However, the length distinction is often in terms of tenseness rather than length, particularly in rapid speech. For
2451-686: The east and north by the northern half of the Canadian province of British Columbia (and a small part of Yukon ). The majority of southeast Alaska is situated in Tlingit Aaní , much of which is part of the Tongass National Forest , the United States' largest national forest . In many places, the international border runs along the crest of the Boundary Ranges of the Coast Mountains (see Alaska boundary dispute ). The region
2508-714: The end of the Chilkoot Trail ( Jilkhoot ). Otherwise, Tlingit is not found in Canada . Tlingit legend tells that groups of Tlingit once inhabited the Stikine , Nass , and Skeena river valleys during their migrations from the interior. There is a small group of speakers (some 85) in Washington as well. Golla (2007) reported a decreasing population of 500 speakers in Alaska. The First Peoples' Cultural Council (2014) reported 2 speakers in Canada out of an ethnic population of 400. As of 2013, Tlingit courses are available at
2565-813: The fishing and ferries in the region, ship building and maintenance are economically significant. Ketchikan hosts a shipbuilding yard owned by Vigor Industrial . Tourists visit southeast Alaska primarily in the summer, and most visit via cruise ships , which run from April 15 to October 30. In 2019, around 1.3 million people visited Alaska by cruise ship. The northbound Inside Passage cruise commonly starts from either Seattle or Vancouver, Canada and stops in various ports including Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway. One-way trips will end in Whittier or Seward. An alternative Gulf of Alaska cruise starts in Whittier (Anchorage) and also passes through southeast Alaska's Inside Passage. The cruise ship industry became prominent in
2622-486: The hill's summit. The last of these, a two-story brick building with a cupola on top known as the Governor's House, was built in 1836 and was destroyed by fire in 1894. In 1867, after the Alaska Purchase was negotiated, Russian Alaska was formally transferred to the United States in a ceremony held on Castle Hill. The Russian-built Governor's House was occupied by United States Army commanders until 1877, and remained
2679-409: The larynx is raised in the same manner as with ejective stops. Characteristically, the ejective fricatives in Tlingit feature a much smaller aperture for frication than is found in ordinary fricatives. That articulation provides increased resistance to counter the continual loss of dynamic airstream pressure. Also, ejective fricatives appear to include tightening of the pharyngeal muscles, which reduces
2736-676: The late 1960s, Tlingit was written exclusively in phonetic transcription in the works of linguists and anthropologists except for a little-known Cyrillic alphabet used for publications by the Russian Orthodox Church . A number of amateur anthropologists doing extensive work on the Tlingit had no training in linguistics and so left numerous samples in vague and inconsistent transcriptions, the most famous being George T. Emmons . However, such noted anthropologists as Franz Boas , John R. Swanton , and Frederica de Laguna have transcribed Tlingit in various related systems that feature accuracy and consistency but sacrifice readability. Two problems ensue from
2793-536: The maintenance of the pretonal system in Tongass Tlingit was caused by the proximity of its speakers around the Cape Fox area near the mouth of the Portland Canal to speakers of Coastal Tsimshian, just to the south. Tlingit has a complex phonological system compared to Indo-European languages such as English or Spanish . It has an almost complete series of ejective consonants accompanying its stop, fricative, and affricate consonants. The only missing consonant in
2850-489: The multiplicity of transcription systems used for Tlingit. One is that there are many of them, thus requiring any reader to learn each individual system depending on what sources are used. The other is that most transcriptions made before Boas's study of Tlingit have numerous mistakes in them, particularly because of misinterpretations of the short vowels and ejective consonants. Accuracy of transcription can be increased by checking against similar words in other systems, or against
2907-468: The portion of the Yakutat Borough lying east of 141° West longitude. Although it has only 6.14 percent of Alaska's land area, it is larger than the state of Maine , and almost as large as the state of Indiana . The southeast Alaskan coast is roughly as long as the west coast of Canada. The 2010 census population of southeast Alaska was 71,616 inhabitants, representing approximately 10% of
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#17327828777102964-574: The region's landscape, birds, wildlife, human uses, climate change, and more, synthesizing data from agencies and a variety of other sources. This area is the traditional homeland of the Tlingit , and home of a historic settling of Haida as well as a modern settlement of Tsimshian . The region is closely connected to Seattle and the American Pacific Northwest economically and culturally. Major industries in southeast Alaska include commercial fishing and tourism (primarily
3021-537: The six-day Battle of Sitka , the Tlingit formally ceded Castle Hill to the Russians. In 1806 the Russians transferred the headquarters of the Russian-American Company and the seat of government of Russian Alaska to Sitka, and Castle Hill was the focal point of the company and government facilities until 1867. They destroyed the Tlingit houses on the hill, and built a succession of structures on
3078-547: The state's total population. About 45% of residents in the southeast Alaska region were concentrated in the city of Juneau , the state capital. As of 2018, the number of settlements in southeast Alaska that have a population of at least 1,000 people has grown to nine. Populations are taken from the 2020 Census . Southeast Alaska includes the Tongass National Forest (which manages Admiralty Island National Monument and Misty Fjords National Monument ), Glacier Bay National Park , and Sitka National Historical Park . Glacier Bay
3135-495: The steep island slopes. Southeast Alaska is primarily served by the state-run Alaska Marine Highway , which links Skagway, Haines, Hoonah , Juneau , Sitka , Petersburg , Wrangell , Ketchikan and other outlying communities with Prince Rupert, BC and Bellingham, Washington ; and secondarily by the Prince of Wales Island -based Inter-Island Ferry Authority , which provides the only scheduled passenger and auto ferry service to
3192-469: The three-tone dialects were older and that the two-tone dialects evolved from them. However, Jeff Leer 's discovery of the Tongass dialect in the late 1970s has shown that the Tongass vowel system is adequate to predict the tonal features of both the two-tone and three-tone dialects, but none of the tonal dialects could be used to predict vocalic feature distribution in Tongass Tlingit. Thus, Tongass Tlingit
3249-468: Was admitted as the 49th U.S. state in 1959, Castle Hill was the location where the first 49-star U.S. flag in Alaska was raised, though the ceremony was unofficial and secret. The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1962 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In 1965 a stone parapet was constructed on the hill, and interpretive plaques were added to
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