I’m James Andrew Dzéiwsh Crippen, a student in linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. I’m Tlingit, and study my ancestral language Tlingit as well as other languages of the Northwestern Pacific Coast region. That’s a strange topic to study in Hawai‘i, but then I’m a strange kind of guy.

My professional interests are in language documentation and language revitalization as applied to Tlingit, and as such cover a wide variety of topics in linguistics such as morphology, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, the Na-Dené (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) family, language revitalization, second language education, linguistic and cultural anthropology, etc.

My background is actually in computer science, something I studied for several years. I dropped out of school and worked in the computer programming field – systems hacking, network programming, and database applications – for about five years. After that sobering experience I decided that my place was in academia, not the real world. I had been doing some extensive reading in linguistics, punishing myself with Chomsky’s recent œuvre, and found that I was more interested in how human languages work than I was in programming languages. So I transferred to UHM – the University of Alaska, Anchorage having no program in linguistics – and now I’m doing what I love to do.

Now that I’m technically in academia, I’ve gone and made one of those curriculum vitæ things. It’s pretty uninspiring, but I hope that it will improve over time. (Updated 04-May-2008.)

The following is a sample of Tlingit written by me. It’s in a sort of didactic, “schoolish” style, something that a Tlingit would say when quizzed about their background. Note that this would never happen in real life, since asking people about their background is rather rude. Instead this is something done in Tlingit language classrooms where the language is being taught. Since I’ve been taught Tlingit in this manner, this is now how I know it best, for better or for worse. It is written in the email orthography for the language. (NB: Try hovering your pointer over some of the text.)

Lingít áyá xhat. Lingít xh'éinaxh Jéiwsh yóo xhat duwasáakw. Deisheetaan naaxh áyá, Khák'w Hít yeedáxh áyá xhat. Axh tlaa kha axh léelk'w Khaachxhana.áak'wx' yéi khuwdzitee. Lingít sáa tléil du jeewú utee, axh tlaa áwé. Axh léelk'w Lingít xh'éinaxh Khaatseet kha Xunyéik yóo duwasáakw. Axh léelk'w du tláa Lawáakhx' yéi khuwdzitee. Waa sá Lingít xh'éinaxh duwasáagun tléil xhwasakú. Axh léelk'w du léelk'w Xunyéik yóo duwasáakw. Angóonx' yéi khuwdzitee. Dléit Kháa kha Chippewa yádixh áyá xhat. Axh éesh Wíshiganx' yéi khuwdzitee. Shtax'héen Khwáan xhat áyá, khu.aa Áankichx' yéi xhat khuwdzitee. Yáa yeedaat Kanáka Aaníx' yéi xhat sitee. Kanáka Aaní sgoontléinix' xhat dultóow.

Below is a sentence in the four-line gloss form as used in my papers. I’ve given this here mostly because I wanted to play with making a gloss in HTML, seeing how well tables would work for the job. It may change to some other format later.

táakw eetée	khúnáxh	lats’áa noojeen	tléikhw
táakw eetée	khúnáxh	0-la-ts’áa=noojeen	tléikhw
spring	very	ABS-[−D, l, −I]-fragrant=DEC.AUX	berry
“the berries (bushes) used to be very fragrant in the spring” (Naish & Story 1973:97)

If you made it through that, then you may be interested in my Swadesh list for Tlingit, recently compiled from various sources. The orthography used for it is Revised Popular orthography except that the underlined “Ǥ/ǥ” or “G̱/g̱” or “G/g” is replaced with the somewhat more readable “G̱/ḡ”. This same orthography is used in most of my other works on Tlingit, particularly the grammar.

Below is a list of a few topics I am actively researching or would like to investigate in the near future. Be the first on your block to fund my research, offer me a grant today!

• Transitivity in Tlingit
  • Identification and analysis of transitivity classes (transitive, unergative, unaccusative, impersonal)
  • Catalog of verb themes based on transitivity
  • Comparison of Tlingit transitivity classes with other Na-Dené (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) languages
• Ergativity in Tlingit
  • Analysis of morphological ergativity
  • Analysis of syntactically ergative constructions
  • Comparison of Tlingit ergativity with other Na-Dené (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) languages
• Nominal morphology of Tlingit
  • Deverbal noun derivation
  • Possessive noun construction and alienability
  • Case markers: postpositions, clitics, and suffixes
• Adjective formation in Tlingit
• A regional census of living Tlingit speakers
• Processes of lexical expansion in Tlingit
• Tlingit taxonomy and description of weather phenomena
• Names as a unique grammatical category in Tlingit
• Tlingit interjections and nonlexical expressions
• Writing a grammar of Tlingit

Here are a few ongoing drafts that I’ve been writing. None of them are complete, but some are more than others. If you have suggestions, feel free to email me.

• Notes on Tlingit Grammar — A rough collection of notes on grammatical structures in Tlingit. Covers morphology, morphophonology, syntax, and some semantics. Includes many illustrative examples. May become a book someday, if I ever manage to finish it. Be warned, this document is over 200 pages and growing rapidly. (Updated: 13-Jun-2008)
• Tlingit Grammar Handbook — An excerpt from Notes on Tlingit Grammar intended to be printed and bound as a small booklet for pocket reference. Includes only the tables with no description. (Updated: 13-Jun-2008)
• An Embarassment of Riches: The Proliferation of Tlingit Writing Systems — A catalog of the various transcriptions and orthographies used for Tlingit from 1789 through today. Begins with a sketch of Tlingit phonetics and phonology. Includes tables for each major writing system, and descriptions of their development and structure. Work in progress, comments welcome. (Updated: 11-Dec-2007)
• Nontraditional Placenames in Tlingit — A short essay on the history and methods of developing nontraditional placenames in Tlingit. To be included as part of Tom Thornton’s upcoming atlas of Tlingit placenames, which will also include some of my fieldwork and research on placenames in the Stikine region. (Updated: 26-Dec-2007)
• Transitivity in Tlingit — A very confused paper in which I attempt to separate Tlingit verbs out into the traditional split-intransitive classes of transitive, unergative, and unaccusative, rather than the idiosyncratic system which Leer (1991), Naish (1966), and Story (1966) presented.
• Revisiting Tlingit Noun Derivation — A review of deverbal noun derivation processes in Tlingit originally described by Gillian Story in her 1966 dissertation on Tlingit morphology.
• Yet Another Tlingit Noun Dictionary — Everybody seems to write one of these, so I did too. Much of it is transcribed from the Naish-Story noun dictionary, but I’ve formatted it added many new words and etymologies. I wrote this before I discovered the Interior Tlingit Noun Dictionary which is basically what I wanted to make. There’s a new complete dictionary on the way from SHI which includes portions of my work, and which they have graciously asked me to review.
• Tlingit Language Bibliography — A bibliography of works on the Tlingit language, in BibTeX format. Feel free to mail any additions or corrections you may have.
• Male Blood Kinship Diagram — A diagram of Tlingit kinship terminology for a male ego describing blood relations. Eventually I’ll do the other three variations on female ego and affinal relations.

Below are some miscellaneous interesting links. No web page is complete without a “links” section, now is it?

• An online Tlingit Noun Dictionary.
• Seth Cable also works on Tlingit, but he knows what he’s doing.