Back

Swadesh asks for a translation of ‘person’s back’.  In the Milluk texts, this word also refers to a snail’s back. 

         In our easy way of writing the Milluk word ts’ai, we find the problem that using an apostrophe to represent both glottal stop and glottalization makes a spelling of ts’ai ambiguous about whether the word has an ejective affricate [ts’] or the affricate [ts] followed by a glottal stop [ʔ].  We solve that problem by pressing a hyphen into service to separate the affricate [ts] from the apostrophe, so that the apostrophe has to be read as a glottal stop. 

         Normally, we reserve the use of hyphens strictly for representing the boundaries between the meaningful parts of words, i.e. we normally use hyphens only as morpheme boundaries.  Jacobs (1939, 1940) volumes of Coos texts have hyphens as a way of writing the dashes that he has in his handwritten field notes to link together words that are pronounced together as a phonetic phrase.  In our modernized Americanist transcriptions of the Milluk texts, those hyphens get modernized to be linking lines [ ‿ ].  The linking lines disappear when we write Milluk phonemically, because what words in a line of text form a phonetic phrase is to a large extent a stylistic matter, rather than being a matter of Milluk syntax.  In our easy way of writing Milluk words, we would not be dividing Milluk words up into their meaningful parts, so the use of a hyphen in one word is not be a problem, although it compels us here to explain a bit about the use of hyphens in writing Milluk. 

         Even though we do not have a shortened diphthong, in this case [aⁱ], in a pronunciation of this word by Annie Miner Peterson (she pronounces it as [ai] in this word), she might well have sometimes pronounced this word just as we hear Lolly Metcalf say it, with a shortened version of the last vowel of the diphthong.  Mrs. Peterson pronounced other Milluk words, sometimes with diphthongs shortened in this way (aⁱ, aᵘ), for at least some of her pronunciations of a particular word.  For Mrs. Peterson, this shortened diphthong at the end of a word was sometimes the only difference between a Milluk word and her own pronunciation of a matching Hanis word, when she was asked for the Hanis and Milluk words together.  In other words, for Mrs. Peterson, having a shortened diphthong at the end of a word was a very Milluk thing to do, but it would not make the difference between one word and another in Milluk.  In this Milluk word, Mrs. Metcalf lets us hear what this very Milluk stylistic effect of a shortened diphthong actually sounds like. 

         Here we can also hear aspiration at the end of this word from Mrs. Metcalf.  The fact that Jacobs did not hear aspiration at the end of this Milluk word from Mrs. Peterson the few times that she said this word in dictating the Milluk texts is something that we take note of, without being able to dismiss Mrs. Metcalf’s aspiration at the end of this word as a stylistic matter in quite the same way that we can put aside the matter of a shortened diphthong as a stylistic matter in Milluk.