Proto-Athabaskan language

First person singular fricative

A peculiar proto-phoneme in Proto-Athabaskan is the sound that Krauss (1976b) represents as *$, and which Leer (2005:284) has represented as *šʸ though lately he has since returned to *$ (e.g. Leer 2008). This is the phoneme found in Proto-Athabaskan, Proto-Athabaskan–Eyak, and Proto-Na-Dene that occurs in various reflexes of the first person singular pronoun. In Athabaskan languages, it usually has a reflex of /š/, the alveolar fricative, but in Eyak it appears as /x/ and in Tlingit as /χ/. Peculiarly, in Kwalhioqua-Tlatskanai, it seems to have been /x/ in at least some forms of the first-person-subject verb prefix (Krauss 1976b). It does not correspond well with other fricatives, a situation that led Krauss to considering it as unique. This proto-phoneme is not given in the table above, but is always assumed to be somehow a part of the Proto-Athabaskan inventory.

New consonant reconstruction

A newer reconstruction by Leer (2005:284) constitutes a significant reorganization of the system. Velars are reinterpreted as palatals, labialized postalveolar affricates are reinterpreted as retroflex consonants, and other labialized consonants are removed. In addition, the clear assertion is made that stops and affricates are phonologically the same class, although they may be articulated somewhat differently. Leer also adopted the argument advanced by Keren Rice (1997) that there was no need to distinguish between *y and *žʸ. The resulting system is somewhat simpler than the traditional one, with 8 fewer phonemes.

The asymmetric lack of retroflex fricatives in the Proto-Athabaskan inventory appears as a surprising gap, but Leer argued against them being distinguished from *š and *ž: "In my reconstruction, PA lacked distinctively reflexed *šʳ and *žʳ as opposed to plain *š and *ž". Although Leer (2005) did not include *ʔ and *h in his list of reconstructed consonants, those two proto-phonemes nevertheless appear in a variety of reconstructions in the same article and hence it can be assumed that they are indeed part of his proto-phoneme inventory.

Tone

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The reconstruction of tone is an issue of major importance in Athabaskan language studies, as well as for the wider historical linguistics field. The possibility of a reconstructable tone system was first proposed by Edward Sapir, although it took around a half-century for his ideas to be realized into a coherent system. Michael Krauss's unpublished manuscript on Athabaskan tone (1979) circulated for decades before being published (2005), and has become the basis for all discussion of Athabaskan tonology. Krauss gives a detailed history of the work on Athabaskan tonology which is briefly summarized here.

The early work on Athabaskan languages ignored the existence of phonemic tone. Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice was the first linguist to describe tone for an Athabaskan language, specifically for Carrier, in 1891. Sapir's first fieldwork on Athabaskan languages was with Chasta Costa and Kato, both Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages that lack tone. He encountered tone in Tlingit in 1914 when working with Louis Shotridge, a student and consultant of Franz Boas, with whom Sapir described the minimal pair /qáːt/ "crippled" and /qaːt/ "sockeye salmon". He then encountered tone in Tsuut'ina (Sarcee) and gradually became convinced that Proto-Athabaskan must be reconstructed as a tonal language, although he was concerned by apparently contradictory findings in Gwich'in, Deg Hit'an, and Navajo. His student Fang-Kuei Li, whom Sapir described as "a very able Chinaman", had the benefit of speaking Mandarin Chinese and hence being well aware of tone. Sapir and Fang-Kuei Li investigated tone in several other Athabaskan languages, including Mattole, Wailaki, Hupa, Dëne Sųłiné (Chipewyan), and Hare. The problem that disturbed Sapir and others was that tone in Athabaskan languages does correspond, but in an unexpected and difficult to explain way.

It can be seen in the table above that the languages differ in how their tones correspond: the first three have low tone where the next three have high tone, and vice versa, with the last three lacking tone entirely. This issue puzzled linguists for some time. Both Li and Harry Hoijer both harbored suspicions that Proto-Athabaskan lacked tone entirely, but it took until 1964 when Michael Krauss published a paper in the International Journal of American Linguistics where he argued that Proto-Athabaskan instead had glottalization contrasts which developed independently into tones in the daughter languages or in some cases were lost. This argument was strengthened by data from Eyak which had a system of glottal modifications on vowels that corresponded well to Athabaskan tones, and furthermore by Jeff Leer's discovery of the Tongass dialect of Tlingit, which had a system closely corresponding that of Eyak.

The oppositions in tonal distribution are explained as an ahistorical division in Athabaskan languages whereby each language becomes either "high-marked", "low-marked", or "unmarked" for tone based on the Proto-Athabaskan reconstruction. The following table adapted from Rice & Hargus (2005:9) shows how the syllable codas of Proto-Athabaskan (PA) and the internal reconstruction of Pre-Proto-Athabaskan (PPA) correspond with those of the high-marked and low-marked languages.

In the above table, the symbol v represents a monomoraic reduced vowel, the VV represents a bimoraic full vowel, and the V a monomoraic full vowel in a syllable nucleus whose second mora is '.^[1] The R represents a sonorant, the S a fricative, the T a stop or affricate, and the ' a glottalization of the preceding segment. Note that nearly all languages that developed tone have also lost syllable-final ejectivity, retaining only the glottalized sonorants and bare glottal stops in that position. (Syllable initial ejective stops and affricates are of course retained.)

The name

The name "classifier" is confusing to non-Athabaskanists since it implies a classificatory function that is not obvious. Franz Boas first described it for Tlingit, saying "it is fairly clear that the primary function of these elements is a classificatory one" (Boas 1917:28), a not inaccurate statement given that it does enter into the classificatory verb system. Previously Edward Sapir had noted it in his seminal essay on the Na-Dene family, calling it a "'third modal element'" (Sapir 1915:540). He described it as indicating "such notions as transitive, intransitive, and passive" (id.), thus having voice and valency related functions. Once it was realized that the Tlingit and Athabaskan morphemes were functionally similar, Boas's name for the Tlingit form was extended to the Athabaskan family. Unfortunately the classifier has only the vague remains of classificatory function in most Athabaskan languages, so in this family the name is opaque.

Because of the confusion that occurs from the use of the term "classifier", there have been a number of proposals for replacement terms. Andrej Kibrik (1993, 1996, 2001) has used the term "transitivity indicator" with the gloss abbreviation TI, Keren Rice (2000, 2009)^{[citation needed]} has used "voice/valence prefix" abbreviated V/V, and for Tlingit Constance Naish and Gillian Story (1973:368–378) used "extensor". None of these alternatives has gained acceptance in the Athabaskan community, and Jeff Leer describes this situation:

A better term would be something like "valentizers", since their principal function is to indicate the valence of the verb ... However, since the name classifier is one of the few grammatical labels sanctioned by common use among Athabaskanists, it is probably not worth the trouble to try to change it.

— Jeff Leer, 1990, p. 93, fn. 12

Reconstruction

Jeff Leer (1990:93) offers an early reconstruction of the Proto-Athabaskan classifier. It is a portmanteau morpheme with two dimensions that are both phonological and functional. The one dimension is the "series", which surfaces as the presence or absence of a lateral fricative. The other dimension is the "D-effect", surfacing as the presence or absence of either vocalization or an alveolar stop.

Leer (2008:22) gives a newer, more complex reconstruction, which takes into account some rare correspondences with the Eyak yi- prefix. This Eyak form corresponds to a Proto-Athabaskan *nʸə- that is mostly lost.