Dirty
We do not really have a teachable-learnable Milluk word meaning ‘dirty’ just by listening to what Lolly says in this interview segment for this second word, but, we have a number of things to look into as we explore the wonderland of Milluk verbal forms in the Milluk texts and elsewhere.
The First Word In This Interview Segment: The Milluk texts do not have a similar word. In relation to what we think that we are hearing as [ kwɪnwɪsæ ] which is the first Milluk word in this interview segment, we are still puzzling over what to make of a phrase that we see in Jacobs’ handwriting on a sheet of paper that is a PDF currently titled “slipfile 11” in our overall Milluk database. There we see [ ntg̣wənwəsɛʔ ] ‘I am filthy’. The n in the middle of that word in Jacobs’ handwriting has a column of three little dots above it and has a column of four little dots below it. The Hanis equivalent word is [ nʔn̩tgwənʔwəsɛʔ ] with the same meaning ‘I am filthy’. That one-word phrase is like a Milluk word in Jacobs’ slip-file dictionary which is [ tg̣wə́nwəs ] ‘grave, dirt, dirty’. The Hanis version of that word is [ tgwə́nʔwəs ] with the same meaning ‘grave, dirt, dirty’.
The third person version of [ ntg̣wənwəsɛʔ ] ‘I am filthy’ might well be *[ tg̣wənwəsɛʔ ] ‘It/he/she is filthy’. Given the sound correspondences that we commonly see between Annie Miner Peterson’s Milluk and Lolly Metcalf’s Coos Bay Milluk, the Coos Bay Milluk equivalent of that might be *[ tgwɪnwɪsɛʔ ] ‘It/he/she is filthy’, with the possibility that the voiceless consonant [ t ] and the voiced consonant [ g ] might be reduced to the voiceless consonant [ k ]. That would get us to what we think that we are hearing as [ kwɪnwɪsæ ], minus the word-final glottal stop that Jacobs heard with the form [ ntg̣wənwəsɛʔ ] ‘I am filthy’.
The Second Word In This Interview Segment: For the second Milluk word in this interview segment that we think that we are hearing as [ kalwɪsæ ], we are reminded of the Milluk word that Lolly has as a translation of ‘dig’ in the interview segment “Dig”. There, we figure that the root word in Lolly’s Coos Bay Milluk word that she has as a translation of ‘dig’ is [ kaʰl ] ‘underground’. Because Swadesh had a partly alphabetical list of words to ask, the interview segment “Dig” and this interview segment “Dirty” happen to be one after the other in the interview, with “Dig” coming just before “Dirty” in the interview. We wonder if another way to say ‘dirty’ in Milluk was to use that word referring to underground. That thought is inspired by another way to say ‘dirty’ that we see in Jacobs’ handwriting on the sheet of paper that is a PDF currently titled “slipfile 11” in our overall Milluk database. Annie Miner Peterson’s other way to say ‘dirty’ there is built around the Milluk word that means ‘mud’.