Bad

The Milluk expression an waen [ʔɑn wæˑn] ‘bad’ consists of the Milluk word an [ʔɑn] ‘not’, and the Milluk word waen [wæˑn] ‘thus’.  It would seem that earlier generations of Milluk speakers avoided saying the word that meant ‘bad’ to such an extent that the original word that meant ‘bad’ just dropped out of the language, replaced by this expression. 

         In the case of the Milluk word that means ‘not’, Jacobs consistently wrote the vowel of this word as a short vowel the many times that the word occurs in the Milluk texts.  Moreover, Jacobs use of a small capital n in his old-fashioned Americanist phonetic transcriptions, which we modernize as | ɴ | in our modernized Americanist transcriptions of the Milluk texts, is consistent with syllables being short. 

         Melville Jacobs (1939, on page 12) says that his use of the small capital n indicates what he calls “shortened duration of sonancy”.  On page 15, he refers to this effect as “shortening of voicing in final sonant continuants”.  We wonder if this fully applies in the case of the Milluk word that means ‘not’, which he often wrote as ending with a small capital n.  What we wonder is whether he ever really heard the n of this word as partly devoiced or really heard aspiration before the n.  That is why in the table of transcriptions above we show three different transcriptions for this expression that we find in the Milluk texts, but we only give two explicitly phonetic transcriptions to cover the three transcriptions that we find in the Milluk texts. 

         Jacobs was not consistent in the matter of vowel length with the Milluk word waen ‘thus’.  This is a word which also occurs many times in the Milluk texts.  Because of Jacobs’ inconsistency about the vowel of this word being transcribed sometimes as a long vowel and sometimes as a short vowel, and because of what we hear of this word in sound recordings, we wonder if there is simply a short version of this very common Milluk word waen ‘thus’.  If we were to go with that idea, we could also write this word as wen in our easy way of writing Milluk words, in addition to writing it as waen, where our easy way of writing it implies both the vowel length that we hear in Lolly Metcalf’s pronunciation of the Milluk word waen ‘thus’ in the expression that means ‘bad’ and implies the vowel shape of [æ] that we also hear in Lolly Metcalf’s pronunciation of this Milluk word in this expression that means ‘bad’.  When we hear Annie Miner Peterson say this word in fluently spoken Milluk in originally phonographic recordings from 1934, we hear this word as much as [wɛn] as we hear it as [wæˑn], but those are examples of fluently spoken Milluk. 

         While Jacobs was inconsistent about the length of the vowel in this particular Milluk word, he was instead ambiguous about the matter of the vowel shape of the vowel in this particular Milluk word.  In his old-fashioned Americanist phonetic transcriptions, he uses only the phonetic symbol epsilon [ɛ] to represent the phonetic vowels that we distinguish as [e], [ɛ], and [æ] in our explicitly phonetic interpretations of his old-fashioned Americanist phonetic transcriptions. 

         How we hear the Milluk phoneme /æ/ as a short vowel is affected somewhat by the fact that we are native speakers of English.  One of the differences between the phonemic vowel /æ/ in English, which we have in the English words ‘bad’ and ‘bat’, and the phonemic vowel /ɛ/, which we have in the English words ‘bed’ and ‘bet’, is that the English phoneme /æ/ is an inherently long vowel in English, while the English phoneme /ɛ/ is an inherently short vowel, in English.  The Milluk phoneme /æ/ can be either a long vowel or a short vowel.  When we hear the Milluk phoneme /æ/ as a short vowel in a Milluk word, even if it has the vowel shape of the phonetic vowel [æ], it is going to sound to us native speakers of English a bit like the phonetic vowel [ɛ], just because /ɛ/ is an inherently short vowel, in English. 

         Where it come to the Milluk word meaning ‘not’, and quite a few other words in Milluk, the challenge for native speakers of English is that the phonemic vowel /a/ in English, in the English word ‘father’, a vowel which we can just as well represent as /ɑ/, using the IPA symbol, is an inherently long vowel in the sound system of the English language.  That leaves aside the matter of entirely unstressed full vowels in English being reduced to schwa [ə].  In Milluk, the phoneme /a/ or /ɑ/, using either the Americanist or the IPA symbol, can be either a long or short vowel.  For its part in Milluk, schwa [ə] can be a stressed vowel.  That is something that does not happen in the kind of English that is generally spoken in Oregon. 

         Short [ɑ] in Milluk and stressed schwa [ə́] both take some getting used to, for native speakers of the kind of English that is generally spoken in Oregon.  The Milluk word that means ‘not’, as we hear it from Lolly Metcalf, is a good place to hear the vowel [a], IPA [ɑ], as a short vowel. 

         We recommend that people imitate how Lolly Metcalf says the Milluk expression that means ‘bad’ as a basis for how to pronounce the Milluk word that we easily write as waen ‘thus’.  It is a good basis for pronouncing this word, no matter what we might have to say about how this words sounds in the fluently spoken Milluk that we can hear from Annie Miner Peterson and no matter what we might say about how this word sounded to Melville Jacobs as Annie Miner Peterson said it in the measured but still connected discourse of text dictation that produced the many examples of this Milluk word that we see in the Milluk texts.