Chief
The Phonemic Vowel / æ /: Our phonetic ways of writing this word favor the idea that we are hearing each of the vowels of this word as the phonetic vowel [ æ ]. We would not be far off if we were to write them all phonetically as [ ɛ ]. Both of these phonetic vowels are ways that the Milluk phonemic vowel / æ / are pronounced, sometimes sounding more like [ ɛ ], the vowel in the English word ‘pet’, but most often sounding like [ æ ], the vowel in the English word ‘hat’. Our easy way to type the word option of spelling it as het-haede experiments with the idea of spelling this phonemic vowel as ae but only when it it a long vowel and only as an easy way to type the word. We avoid the logical option of doubling the letter e there to represent this phonemic vowel as a long vowel only because we use ee to represent the phonetic vowel [ i ], the vowel in the English word ‘see’, in our instant phonetic Englishization spellings.
Instant Phonetic Englishization: hatt_had_eh.
A Hyphen in a Reduplicated Word: In our easy ways of writing this word, the hyphen serves to separate a letter t from a following letter h, so as not to spell th, like we have in so many English words. It also has to do with the idea that this word involves partial reduplication of the word. In the Milluk texts, there is a word that Jacobs types as | hɛ́·dɛ |, which we type phonetically as [ hǽˑdæ ]. It means ‘rich person’. The word that Jacobs types as | hɛthɛ́·dɛ |, which we type phonetically as [ hæthǽˑdæ ] is a reduplicated form of the same word. The part that gets doubled is / hæt /, so the t and the following h are in different syllables. Our use of a hyphen makes that clear. In phonemic representations of Milluk words, where we use hyphens exclusively to separate the meaningful parts of words (i.e. we use hyphens only as morpheme boundaries in phonemic representations of words), we type the reduplicated word as / hæt-hǽˑdæ /, where the ‘reduplicant’, the doubled part, counts as a meaningful part of a word, which is to say as a morpheme, even though we do not go so far as to analyze the rest of the word, which might itself consist of two meaningful parts.