Linguistic Transcriptions
With the flowering of American anthropology and the focus on the Northwest Coast came a number of linguistic transcriptions of Tlingit. Most were constructed in the Boasian tradition, one used by Boas himself in his rudimentary Tlingit grammar published in 1917. The other most widespread transcriptions were the one used extensively by John Swanton in his Tlingit Myths and Texts and The Tlingit Language, and the one used by Frederica de Laguna in her Story of a Tlingit Village and Under Mount Saint Elias.
The recent publication of George T. Emmons's The Tlingit Indians was heavily edited by De Laguna and subsequently uses her transcription system. Emmons himself did not use any regular transcription when writing Tlingit words and phrases, despite requests from anthropologists of the day. His idiosyncratic and inconsistent recordings of Tlingit were mostly translated by De Laguna into her transcription, but a number of words and phrases he wrote down continue to puzzle linguists and Tlingit speakers alike.
Read more about this topic: Tlingit Alphabet
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