Axe

The easy way to write it spelling for Lolly Metcalf’s South Slough Milluk, which is tlhitlht!u, has an ejective at the beginning of the second syllable, t!u, matching the ejective that Jacobs heard from Annie Miner Peterson, where he wrote | tƚə́tƚtʼu |.  We have written it as an ejective, with the exclamation mark, because the [t] that we actually hear from Lolly Metcalf at the beginning of the second syllable is a voiceless unaspirated stop, not an aspirated stop, such as there is word-initially in [tʰuya] ‘fall, fell’.  See, especially the interview segment “He Fell Off”.  This makes that syllable much like [du], making the stop consonant there almost what we call a ‘heavy pronunciation’ of the ejective /tʼ/.  Such heavy pronunciations, where Lolly pronounces a consonant as a voiced stop which she also pronounces sometimes as an ejective, are common in Lolly Metcalf’s South Slough Milluk.  Evidently, a sound change was very much in progress at South Slough in the Nineteenth Century, whereby /tʼ/ was becoming /d/.  The t in the English word ‘stew’ is a voiceless unaspirated alveolar stop [t], unlike the aspirated [tʰ] at the beginning of the English word ‘two’. 

         This is not the only Milluk word where Lolly Metcalf has [ɪ́] where Annie Miner Peterson has [ə́].  Lolly says the Milluk word gwilla ‘younger sister’ as [gwɪ́lˑa], where Annie is transcribed as saying | gwə́l·a | ‘younger sister’.  There is also the example of the Milluk word meaning ‘younger brother’, where we hear [mɪtɬgwɪ́la] from Lolly, but Jacobs transcribed Annie as saying | mitƚgwə́la |, and once | mə́tƚgwə́l·a |. 

         Notice that our phonetic transcription here of [gwɪ́lˑa] for how Lolly says gwilla ‘younger sister’ is technically a mix of the Americanist and IPA systems of phonetic writing.  It is easier to type and read the IPA symbol for length [ˑ], than it is for us to type and read the equivalent Americanist symbol called Middle Dot.  But when we quote Milluk words out of the Milluk texts, they are transcribed there with the middle dot symbol.  In our easy way of writing Milluk words, we write long consonants as double. 

         The IPA phonetic symbol for a voiced velar stop is [ɡ], but it is easier to type the equivalent Americanist phonetic symbol [g].  So [gwɪ́lˑa] is neither fully Americanist, by one way of figuring it, nor properly IPA, which is a very standardized system of phonetic writing.  However, it is in the modern Americanist tradition of phonetic writing to adopt phonetic symbols from the IPA for convenience, or necessity, depending what the issue is.