Snot

Instant Phonetic Englishization: witt_hliss, the second time that Lolly says the word.

The word ‘snot’ does not occur as a translation of any word in the Milluk texts and does not appear in Jacobs’ slip-file dictionary, nor on any of the PDFs that we have of pages of Milluk phrases and sentences that Jacobs elicited from Mrs. Peterson.

What We Think We Hear and Why: We have to take seriously all of what we hear and even what we think that we hear of Lolly’s first time pronouncing the Milluk word in this interview segment. That is even though she does not repeat all what we hear the first time that she says the word, when she says the word again. For the second time that Lolly says the word, we actually think we hear a bit of nazalization with the vowel in the first syllable, even though we do not write it in our phonetic transcription of that second token of the word. Nonetheless that hint of nasalization bolsters our impression of what we hear with her first time saying the word. It may be though, that in listening to the first time that she says the word, we are really hearing only nasalization with the vowel in the first syllable rather than much or anything of a nasal consonant [ n ] that we do have in in our phonetic transcription of that first token of the word. We include the detatched uvular fricative for that first token of the word, which we definitely hear, and the nasal consonant [ n ] that we at least imagine that we hear there, because Leo J. Frachtenberg (1913, on page 209) in the “Vocabulary” section of his volume “Coos Texts”, has a Hanis word in his old-fashioned Americanist system of phonetic writing, written as:

xwî ́nʟîs snot.

We interpret his transcription there to be [ xwɪ́ntɫɪs ] ‘snot’ in our modern Americanist system of phonetic writing. That is a pulled-together version of what we hear Lolly say, but only the first time that she says the word.