Horn, Horns
Instant Phonetic Englishization: k!oo_mah, ending with a scraping sound which is a cross between hee and shee, but it is just one fricative consonant, with no vowel at all, made with the tongue far forward and flat, close to the roof of the mouth.
Lolly's first token of this word [ kʼu·max̯ ] begins with what we hear as a very slightly ejective consonant. Her second token [ gu·max̯ ] begins with what we hear as a slightly voiced stop consonant, the G in the English word ‘goo’. Her third token [ kʼu·max̯ ] begins with quite a robust ejective, with a real popping sound, so that there can be no doubt that it is an ejective.
Swadesh asks for a translation for the English word ‘horns’ but, as Swadesh no doubt assumed, Milluk nouns are neither specifically plural nor singular. There is, however, a notable exception with the Milluk word which mean ‘child’ and the Milluk word which means ‘children’, which are completely different words. It didn’t occur to him to ask for the Milluk word meaning ‘children’, so we don’t hear that word from Lolly Metcalf. In the samples that we have of fluently spoken Milluk, recorded phonographically in 1934, we can hear Annie Miner Peterson say the Milluk word [ hiˑmæ ] ‘children’ a number of times.
In the Milluk texts, the word in this interview segment meaning ‘horn, horns’ occurs twice. Each time it refers to the horn part of a saddle.