Fight, White

Link to the Sound File: Click on the link below to get to a page where there is a complete sound file of this interview segment, where Swadesh and Mrs. Metcalf get it straight that she has also said the Milluk word meaning 'white'. As a bonus you can hear the Coos Bay Milluk word meaning 'fight' twice more.  

https://soundcloud.com/miluk-org/fight-white-lhm-interview/s-tL4nt

Three Ways to Say ‘fight’ in Hanis and Milluk Combined:  In the Milluk texts that Annie Miner Peterson dictated to Melville Jacobs, there is no Milluk word meaning ‘fight’ to match the Milluk word meaning ‘fight’ that we hear from Lolly Metcalf in this interview segment.  Instead, there are two rather different Milluk words that mean ‘fight’ in the Milluk texts.  However, in a Hanis text, there is a Hanis word that means ‘fight’ which is very much like the Milluk word meaning ‘fight’ that we hear from Lolly Metcalf in this interview segment.  The Hanis word can be heard in a passage of fluently spoken Hanis by Mrs. Peterson, recorded phongraphically in 1934, where she says [ wǽ·læʔni ] ‘they fought’.  There, she tells the same story that we can read in the published Hanis text which is titled, “The walkers and winged things fought”, in Jacobs’ (1940) volume of Coos texts, on pages 232-233. 

Fight and White: In this interview segment, we get to hear the Milluk verb that means ‘white’ for the second time in the interview.  That is because Lolly misheard what Swadesh was asking for in this interview segment.  Both here and in the interview segment ‘White’ we can hear that there are two different ways to pronounce the Milluk word meaning ‘white’ in Lolly Metcalf’s Coos Bay Milluk.  

 

Instant Phonetic Englishization:  wheh_lann_noo, where wheh is like the English word ‘whack’, minus the ck, lann, is like the Englsh word ‘land’, minus the d, followed by noo which is like the Englsh word ‘new’. 

Fight and White:  Lolly said [ kʌs ] ‘white’, then [ x̣ ], which is just the beginning of another version of that word.  We get to hear Swadesh say [ kʌs ] ‘white’.  They subsequently get it straightened out that [ kʌs ] is one version of a Milluk word meaning ‘white’.  It is clear in the sound file here that [ wæ·lǽnu ] means ‘fight’.  For two complete versions of the Milluk word meaning ‘white’, [ x̣kʌs ] and [ kʌs ], in Lolly Metcalf’s Coos Bay Milluk, see the interview segment "White".  There are also two parallel ways, [ x̣qʌs ] and [ qʌs ] that Annie Miner Peterson had to say that same Milluk word meaning ‘white’.