Green, Raw

Neither the English word ‘green’ nor the English word ‘raw’ occur as a translation for any Milluk word in the Milluk texts and neither shows up elsewhere in our searchable Milluk database. However, in Jacobs’ slip-file dictionary, which is searchable in the sense that it is an alphabetical list (actually two lists) there is a file slip that has “blue; green” as a translation for the Milluk word that we hear from Lolly Metcalf in interview segment “Blue” on this website.

Instant Phonetic Englishization: dlems.

What we make of this Milluk word that we hear from Lolly in this interview segment owes much to what we have found in Frachtenberg’s (1913) volume of Coos texts. On page 212, in the vocabulary, he lists a Hanis word which he translates as ‘raw’ and which he writes in his very old-fashioned Americanist system of phonetic writing as [ ʟémîs ]. We have to modernize it as [ tɫɛmɪs ], but we wonder if it might actually have begun with a voiced consonant and been [ dlɛmɪs ].

In a list of phonetic symbols that he uses, for pairs of voiced and voiceless stop consonants, including d, t, Frachtenberg writes on pages 3 and 4 “As in English, surds and sonants difficult to distinguish”. We interpret his old-fashioned phonetic terminology there to read that he had a hard time distinguishing between voiced and voiceless stop consonants.

In the same volume, the Hanis word meaning ‘raw’ occurs on page 32 in a Hanis texts where it refers to skunk-cabbage being raw because it is not fully cooked. In the story, the cooking process had already begun for the skunk-cabbage.