He Poured It

In our easy way of typing the one-word sentence that we hear from Lolly in this interview segment, we have the problem that we have no way to indicate the vowel [ i ], as in the English word ‘see’, without also suggesting that it is a long vowel.  In the case of this word, judging from what we hear from Lolly of the word that we hear in this interview segment, the vowel is a decidedly short and somewhat breathy vowel, but it does have the tongue-height and tenseness of the vowel [ i ].  

We think that Melville Jacobs wrote the vowel as being a long vowel in the one-word sentence | tɫg̯iˑts | ‘he spilled it’, that he heard from Annie Miner Peterson, not because he actually heard it as a long vowel, but because of the vowel shape that it has, which is the vowel [ i ], as in the English word ‘see’.  He wrote the vowel in another form of the Milluk word and in matching Hanis words with the phonetic symbol Iota [ ɩ ], which for him was a short vowel symbol.  We see how Jacobs transcribed these words in his handwriting in a PDF numbered 2 that we have, among 35 such PDFs of phrases that Jacobs elicited in Hanis and Milluk.