Ahtna Texts

University Of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Fairbanks AK

Investigators

Abstract

Ahtna is an Alaskan Athabascan language, spoken in the Copper River area of Southcentral Alaska. Since the 1970s there have been many recordings made of Ahtna storytellers. The collection of text recordings made by Alaska Native Language Center Professor Emeritus James Kari, with which we propose to work, is of very high quality. Some of these recordings have been physically archived at ANLC, but others are still in Kari's private collection. The texts are in all stages of completion, from audio recording only to full translation. This project will finish the texts and bring them together with audio in several small books. For each of these publications there will be an accompanying CD with audio files that can be listened to as accompaniment to reading, but which also includes HTML-based aligned text and audio for study purposes. The inclusion of multimedia CDs in the publications will allow a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss to be available to scholars and learners without disturbing the aesthetic values of the books themselves. Siri Tuttle has been working with Alaskan Athabaskan languages for sixteen years. She, in collaboration with Kari, will rough out transcriptions for those texts that do not have them. A student assistant will create digital text files for transcriptions that exist only in typescript or hand-written form. The student will also work on creating aligned text in HTML. Kari will assist in this process by organizing sound and text materials still in his private collection and bringing them into the project. Tuttle, Kari and the student will work with speakers of Ahtna to refine and edit the texts as needed. This work will be carried out mainly in Fairbanks, but elders will also be consulted in Ahtna communities such as Cantwell, Mentasta, Gulkana and Tazlina.