Embedded Files
An Emphatic Pronoun: This word is an emphatic third person pronoun, not the normal way of saying ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘she’, or ‘her’ in Milluk. The normal way is for a third person pronoun to be understood as the subject of any pronominally-unmarked Milluk verb and for a third person pronoun to be understood as the object of any pronominally-unmarked transitive Milluk verb. This emphatic third person pronoun | hidži | occurs a total of some thirty-eight times in the Milluk texts translated in a wide variety of ways. The variety of ways include the translation ‘they’ for | hidží_iɫ |, with the third person plural marker, and include where the reference is to things. There, the English word ‘they’ is a plural of ‘it’.
Instant Phonetic Englishization: hijj_ee for Lolly’s first pronunciation of this word, but hijj_ih for her second time saying this word.
Word-Final [ ɪ ]: The second time that Lolly says this word gives us a rare example where we can actually hear the short, lax phonetic vowel [ ɪ ] at the end of a Milluk word. This is the vowel in the English word ‘sit’. In his handwritten field notes, Jacobs often phonetically transcribed Milluk words as ending with this phonetic vowel [ ɪ ], which he wrote with the letter Iota [ ɩ ]. In his published Milluk texts, the iotas that he wrote in his handwritten phonetic transcriptions appear as the short vowel i. In this interview segment, Lolly demonstrates that ending a Milluk word with this short lax vowel [ ɪ ] is a part of the normal range of pronunciations for Milluk words that we normally transcribe phonetically as ending with the phonetic vowel [ i ], the vowel in the English word ‘see’.
In our easy way for typing Milluk words, we write this vowel with the letter doubled as ii. In the kind of English spoken by most people in Oregon, words do not end with the short lax phonetic vowel [ ɪ ]. Lolly demonstrates that they can in Milluk, but that the same words can also end with the longer and more tense phonetic vowel [ i ], the vowel in the English word ‘see’, without it making any difference.
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