Always

Lolly’s First Time Saying the Word:  When Swadesh asks Lolly to translate ‘always’ into Milluk, she finds herself saying something that ends with the English word ‘mint’.  However, the second time, she succeeds in saying the Milluk word / guusminʼ / ‘always’.  She ends the word with an unreleased glottal stop [ ʔ̚ ].  We suspect that that was exactly what she was trying to do the first time, when she accidentally said the English word ‘mint’. 

What We Do in English:  It happens that a very casual pronunciation of the English word ‘mint’ actually has some of us saying the word ending with an unreleased t [ t̚ ] which is simultaneous with an unreleased glottal stop [ ʔ̚ ].  We think that the second time that she tries to say the Milluk word / guusminʼ / ‘always’, she has a rather careful pronunciation of this Milluk compound word, where there is no t [ t ] at all, only an unreleased glottal stop.  That is very much like an extremely casual pronunciation of the English word ‘mint’, the way that some of us actually find ourselves saying it in rapid casual speech. 

What Threw Lolly Off:  We think that what threw Lolly off was not just 36 years of not having spoken Milluk with another speaker of Milluk, but the fact that she had already set her mind to saying Milluk words carefully at this point, some four minutes into the tape-recorded part of the interview.  In this case, she was trying to say a Milluk word carefully which ends just like an English word ends, but only when the English word is spoken very casually, where we swallow the final consonant which happens to involve a simultaneous unreleased glottal stop. 

Daisy Starting to Interrupt Lolly for Lolly’s Second Time Saying the Word:  Lolly’s younger sister Daisy noticed that Lolly had made a mistake saying / guusminʼ / ‘always’, the first time that Lolly tries to say it.  When Lolly is saying it the second time, the distinctive timbre of Daisy’s voice can be heard interrupting Lolly in the middle of the [ s ] at the end of the first syllable, but Daisy stops herself, to give Lolly a chance to finish saying what she is trying to say.  That is all we hear from Daisy in this interview segment. 

In the Milluk texts, Jacobs wrote the Milluk word / guusminʼ / ‘always’ 39 times as | gu·s_min |, indicating that there is nothing phonetically special about how the word ends, but he wrote it 8 times as | gu·s_miɴ | where he indicates that there is something phonetically special about how the word ends.  When he wrote it 8 times as | gu·s_miɴ |, he may have heard Annie Miner Peterson say it ending with an unreleased glottal stop which is how we hear Lolly Metcalf say the word in this interview segment.  If he had heard it end with a released glottal stop, he would have indicated that there was a glottal stop at the end of the word, because he had a way to write that.  His use of a small capital n indicates a short cut-off syllable, which in this case would seem to have been an unreleased glottal stop. 

An Old-Fashioned Pronunciation:  We have to suspect that Lolly’s pronunciation of the word is not just a careful pronunciation of the word but also an old-fashioned pronunciation of it.  When Melville Jacobs was taking text dictation from Annie Miner Peterson and he wrote this Milluk compound word / guusminʼ / ‘always’ 8 times as | gu·s_miɴ |, we have to suspect that Annie too was using an old-fashioned pronunciation of this word.  Our easy way of typing the word as / guusmin’ / is what we believe to be an old-fashioned pronunciation of it.  Apparently, it was normally pronounced as / guusmin / [guˑsmɪn] in Nineteenth Century Milluk, with no glottal stop at all, not even one muted by not being released. 

Troy’s two pronunciations of the word follow how his great great grandmother, Lolly Metcalf, said the word guusmanʼ ‘always’, the second time that she attempted to say it.   It is especially Troy’s second token of the word, where it is easy to hear the phonetic effects of an unreleased glottal stop.