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47-708: Nelchina ( Ahtena : Xaz Ghae Na’ ) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Copper River Census Area, Alaska , United States. The population was 45 at the 2020 census , down from 59 in 2010. Nelchina appears on the Valdez D-8 on the U.S.Geological Survey Map. The elevation is 2,402 feet. Nelchina is located between Milepost 137.5 and 150.5 of the Glenn Highway, at the junction of the Little Nelchina River and Crooked Creek. It

94-416: 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

141-466: A disjunct boundary. '+' indicates a morpheme boundary. ta into water # # d QUAL + + l CL + + dlok' laugh   (lexical listing: verb theme) ta # d + l + dlok' {into water} # QUAL + CL + laugh "Water is gurgling." (surface form) In the Ahtna language the verb typically goes after the noun. In the Ahtna language, modifiers usually go after

188-455: A household in the CDP was $ 40,625, and the median income for a family was $ 40,625. Males had a median income of $ 37,917 versus $ 18,750 for females. The per capita income for the CDP was $ 10,742. There were 19.0% of families and 17.8% of the population living below the poverty line , including 10.0% of under eighteens and none of those over 64. The Copper River School District previously operated

235-484: A natural land bridge. Many indigenous Native American languages are to have derived from this proto-Athabaskan language. Ahtna and other Athabaskan languages, like Navajo, have many similarities, due to their common ancestry. The Ahtna language has changed very much and very often, and it is still changing today. Within the past century more than one hundred words have made their way into the Ahtna vocabulary mostly due to influence from English. Contact with Russians influenced

282-618: A word. The consonants in Kari's IPA phonology and practical orthography are shown in the following table . The vowels in Kari's practical orthography and phonology are as follows. There is some variation in pronunciation of words according to dialect. Possession is indicated by prefixes such as s- "my", u- or yu'- "his/her", ne- "our"; as in snaan "my mother", unaan (or yu'naan ) "his/her mother", nenaan "our mother". Verbs are primarily prefixing. There are often six or more prefixes before

329-468: 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 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

376-474: Is a weather station located nearby at an elevation of 2,312 ft (705 m). Temperature extremes range from −63 °F (−53 °C) to 95 °F (35 °C). Snowfall averages 46 inches (120 cm), with total precipitation of 11 inches (28 cm) per year. Nelchina is an Ahtna Athabascan name. Gold in the creeks draining from the Chugach Mountains brought prospectors to this area in

423-601: Is about 30 miles west of Glennallen and Mendeltna, just east of Mat-Su Borough Boundary. Nelchina is located at the Chitina Recording District. According to the United States Census Bureau , the CDP has a total area of 46.7 square miles (121 km), of which, 46.0 square miles (119 km) of it is land and 0.7 square miles (1.8 km) of it (1.48%) is water. Nelchina is located in the subarctic climate zone . Snowshoe Lake

470-673: 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

517-442: Is because of the influence of English, which makes 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

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564-610: Is classified as belonging to the Northern Athabaskan languages , a subgrouping of the Athabaskan languages . Ahtna is one of the eleven Athabaskan languages native to Alaska. The Ahtna language comes from the proto-Athabaskan language , believed to have evolved 5,000 to 10,000 years ago when humans migrated from Eurasia to North America over the Bering land bridge ( Beringia ), when it was dried up and exposed creating

611-434: Is common to later hear such speakers producing those forms themselves. It 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

658-404: 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 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

705-405: 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

752-410: Is possible but has not been verified that aspirated and unaspirated stops are collapsed into 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,

799-735: Is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada and is a branch of 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

846-621: 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 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

893-542: 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 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

940-663: The Russian Empire had contact with Alaska and the coast of North America down to Sonoma County, California . After 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

987-799: 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 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

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1034-483: The Ahtna Region: Cantwell, Chistochina, Chitina, Copper Center, Gakona, Gulkana, Mentasta and Tazlina. They are all recognized federally. There are 15 elderly speakers out of a population of 500, and the language is facing extinction. The subsistence and fishing-rights activist Katie John (1915–2013) of Mentasta helped develop an Ahtna alphabet in the 1970s and recorded a pronunciation guide of

1081-723: The Ahtna language with many Russian loanwords being introduced. With contact from English speakers, especially recently, English words have also been introduced. Some words are also borrowed from the Alaskan Tlingit and Alutiiq native languages. The Ahtna region consists of the Copper River Basin and the Wrangell Mountains. The Ahtna Region is bordered by the Nutzotin river in the Northeast and

1128-978: The Alaska Range in the North. The Talkeetna Mountains are to the Chugach Mountains are to the South. The Upper Ahtna live on the upper portion of the Copper River, The Middle or Central Ahtna live slightly down river from there, The Lower Ahtna live near the mouth of the Copper River, which opens into the Gulf of Alaska, and the Western Ahtna live to the West of the River. The Ahtna people live on and near traditional villages. There are eight villages within

1175-516: The Haida linguist John Enrico presented new arguments and reopened the debate. Victor Golla writes in his 2011 California Native Languages , "John Enrico, 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

1222-644: The Lottie Sparks School in Nelchina. Ahtena language The Ahtna language consists of four different dialects: Upper, Central, Lower, and Western. Three of the four are still spoken today. Ahtna is closely related to Dena'ina . The similar name Atnah occurs in the journals of Simon Fraser and other early European diarists in what is now British Columbia as a reference to the Tsilhqot'in people, another Northern Athapaskan group. Ahtna

1269-649: The Mentasta dialect. In 2012 a facing-bilingual collection of poetry in Ahtna and English, The Indian Prophet , was published by poet John Smelcer . In a revitalization program, the Ya Ne Dah Ah School in Sutton, Alaska teaches the Ahtna language as a part of its curriculum. As of 2010, a digital archiving project of Ahtna was underway. There are four main dialect divisions and eight bands (tribal unions): The comparison of some animal names in

1316-601: 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

1363-468: 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 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

1410-481: The articulation of ejective fricatives includes complete closure of the glottis before frication begins, and 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

1457-464: The distances that separate them, both geographic and linguistic. Tlingit is currently classified as 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

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1504-718: 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 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

1551-411: The late 1800s. The Nelchina area offered several trails into the mountains. Nelchina was a mining settlement established in 1913. It was first reported by Theodore Chaplin in a 1915 USGS publication. Nelchina first appeared on the 2000 U.S. Census as a census-designated place (CDP). As of the census of 2000, there were 71 people, 27 households, and 20 families residing in the CDP. The population density

1598-676: 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

1645-454: The late 20th century by (Heinz-)Jürgen Pinnow (1962, 1968, 1970, int. al.) and Michael E. Krauss (1964, 1965, 1969, int. al.) showed 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,

1692-421: The more accurate d [t] . There 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

1739-489: 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

1786-699: The noun they modify. Examples of this include the name of the deity or trickster figure Saghani Ggaay , where saghani is the noun " raven " and ggaay the adjective "little, small" or in the term nen ten "permafrost", a combination of nen "land, ground" and ten "frozen". This word order is also seen in place names such as Dghelaay Ce'e " Denali /Mount McKinley", literally "Biggest Mountain", and Ben Ce'e "Lake Susitna", literally "Big Lake". Tlingit language The Tlingit language ( English: / ˈ k l ɪ ŋ k ɪ t / KLING -kit ; Lingít Tlingit pronunciation: [ɬɪ̀nkɪ́tʰ] )

1833-601: 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 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

1880-481: The pharyngeal muscles, which reduces 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

1927-514: 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 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

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1974-463: The stem and then one or more suffixes. (1a) displays a surface form in Ahtna spelling while (1b) is the verb theme. Three prefixes are present that have to be listed with the stem to make up the form. Anything adjacent in a verb theme can be separated by morphemes in the forms surface. Verb themes display what elements should be listed in a dictionary for a speaker to be able to reconstruct the verb. '#' displays an important word-internal boundary known as

2021-584: 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 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

2068-429: The three Athabaskan languages: Athabaskan languages are primarily prefixing. Many prefixes are presented together. There is limited suffixation and often one word has as much meaning as an English language sentence. Verbs are very complex therefore creating many different meanings or analysis of verbs. Some verbs include syntactic principles in addition to and/or replacement of morphological principles when constructing

2115-483: Was 1.5 inhabitants per square mile (0.58/km). There were 33 housing units at an average density of 0.7 per square mile (0.27/km). The racial makeup of the CDP was 90.14% White , 4.23% Native American , and 5.63% from two or more races. Of the 27 households, 25.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 66.7% were married couples living together, and 25.9% were non-families. 25.9% of all households were made up of individuals, and 3.7% had someone living alone who

2162-459: Was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.63 and the average family size was 3.15. In the CDP, the age distribution of the population shows 28.2% under the age of 18, 5.6% from 18 to 24, 19.7% from 25 to 44, 32.4% from 45 to 64, and 14.1% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 43 years. For every 100 females, there were 153.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 131.8 males. The median income for

2209-571: Was sparse and irregular until the early 20th century. The language appears to have spread northward from 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

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