Woman, Wife

The Variation Between [ ɪ ] and [ ə ]:  In her work dictating Milluk texts to Melville Jacobs, Mrs. Peterson said many examples of | hú·mis | ‘woman’, but she also said several examples of | hú·məs | ‘woman’.  Two of the examples of | hú·məs |, with a schwa in the last syllable of this word, have a suffix added to the word to make it refer to someone saying in a text that he has a wife.  In one of those two examples with that suffix, stress falls on the schwa in the last syllable of this word.  Those example are in Jacobs’ first (1939) volume of Coos texts, on page 45 in the text titled “A girl became a dangerous being of the woods”.  In that particular text and in one other text, Jacobs consistently heard a schwa in the last syllable of each example of this word occurring in those two texts, but in another text in Jacobs (1940) second volume of Coos texts, there is an example of | hú·məs | ‘woman’, but also an example of | hú·mis | ‘woman’ in the next line of text.  

We have not examined all of the examples of this word which occur in the Milluk texts, looking into the variation between | hú·mis | ‘woman’, ‘wife’ and | hú·məs | ‘woman’, ‘wife’, in order to see what conclusions might be drawn from the facts, in total.  Suffice it to say now that there is this variation, which we summarize in our table of transcriptions.