Island

Instant Phonetic Englishization:  dlah’_ah. 

Lolly Metcalf says this word a third time in the next interview segment which happens to be the interview segment “Ocean” on this website.  She says it just after Swadesh has asked for a translation for ‘ocean’.  We think it sounds more like [ tɫaha ] there. 

The pronunciation [ tɫaha ] is interesting to us because in the Milluk texts the only Milluk word meaning ‘island’ appears just once as  [ tɫʼíʰ ].  This is [ tɬʼíʰ ], in an IPA transcription.  In the Milluk texts the word meaning ‘island’ appears in paragraph 11 of the autobiographical text titled “Annie Miner Peterson”, on page 110 of Jacobs’ (1939) volume of Coos texts.  This is where Mrs. Peterson refers to Ireland, which is literally ‘island land’ in Milluk.  Evidently the Irish neighbors of the Milluk people in the town of Empire told their Milluk neighbors that Ireland was an island, which it certainly is.  Also, ‘Ireland’ sounds a bit like ‘island land’, but that is in the English that the Irish people were speaking to their Milluk neighbors.