Indian Money

        This is the same Milluk word as Lolly Metcalf’s translation for ‘beads.  In this interview segment, she has a stronger glottal stop the second time that she says the word, which is what she did in that interview segment, as well.  The second time that she says the word in both interview segments, it is also more obvious that the glottal stop begins the third syllable.  Instead of being between the diphthong [ai] and consonant [m], the glottal stop is simultaneous with the beginning of the [m].  This is phonetic evidence that in phonemic terms this is a glottalized m /m’/. 

         In our table of transcriptions, it is only with the instant phonetic Englishizations that we show anything that reflects the fact that Melville Jacobs often wrote the last syllable of this word as | mis |, making it the same as the English word ‘miss’.  We might do the same in transcribing at least some of Lolly Metcalf’s four tokens of the word in these two interview segments, here for ‘Indian money’ and there for ‘beads’. 

         There are only two times in the Milluk texts that this word is translated as ‘beads’, while there are on the order of forty-nine times in the Milluk texts that it is translated as ‘money’.  A number of those times the words ‘large dentalia’ are in parentheses next to the word ‘money’.