He Swallowed It
We really mean it to say in our translation of this one-word Milluk sentence that it can mean ‘It swallowed him’ as one of its meanings. In a Milluk text there is a sentence which ends with this clause:
tsú‿qʼwá·ni‿tƚɛ‿x̣‿tsʼɛ́hem.
so_swallowed.him_the_ERG_whale
and the whale swallowed him.
In our interlinear line of literal translation, the abbreviation ERG stands for the grammatical term ‘ergative’. The word meaning ‘whale’ is the subject of a transitive verb in Milluk, which called for the ergative particle x̣, which itself literally means ‘from’. One might say that the action of the verb is literally coming from the whale.
Instant Phonetic Englishization: gwah_nee for Lolly’s Coos Bay Milluk pronunciation with its velar and heavy pronunciation of the uvular ejective that Annie has in her pronunciation of the word.