Bear

Voiceless Aspirated Stop Consonants:  A diligent scholar of the Milluk language, Patricia Whereat Phillips, gave us a list of 109 Milluk items most of which were recorded by J. P. Harrington.  One Milluk word that Harrington wrote down from hearing Lottie Evanoff saying it was the word [ p‘æ´læˆl ] ‘black bear’.  Looking at Harrington’s transcription reminded us of something that we knew perfectly well, but had put aside as we have been making our phonetic transcriptions of Milluk words.  Harrington heard the first consonant of this word as an voiceless aspirated bilabial consonant.  In other words, Harrington heard the first consonant of this word as the same phonetic consonant which is the first consonant of the English word ‘pal’, which in purely phonetic terms is [ pʰæl ].  In the IPA, the turned apostrophe symbol [ ʽ ] indicates light aspiration.  Jacobs used that symbol to indicate (any amount of) aspiration, but almost never wrote the voiceless stop consonants at the beginnings of Milluk words as aspirated.  One way that Milluk and English are alike is that voiceless stop consonants at the beginnings of words are lightly aspirated.  Because English and Milluk are alike in this way, in making our transcriptions of Milluk words, we, along with Jacobs, have generally not bothered to bring out the fact that voiceless stop consonants at the beginnings of words in Milluk are lightly aspirated.  However, now Harrington has reminded us of the fact that they are.  

The Tongue Height Range of the Milluk Phoneme /æ/ before /l/:  Harrington heard the vowel in the second syllable of this Milluk word as having a higher tongue height than the vowel [æ], but evidently not high enough in tongue height to cause him to transcribe it as [ɛ].  In other words, Lottie Evanoff pronounced the word in a way that is roughly halfway between Lolly Metcalf’s first pronunciation of the word as [ pʰælǽl ] and her second pronunciation of the word as [ pʰælɛ́l ], if you believe our phonetic transcriptions.