Belly Button - Milluk

‘belly button, navel’, ‘umbilical cord’, easy way to type it: kwaluu		for AMP: qwaluu
Lolly Metcalf’s South Slough Milluk		Annie Miner Peterson’s Milluk
Americanist Phonetic	IPA	Exactly Jacobs’ transcription	Americanist Phonetic & IPA
[ kwálu ], then [ kwálu ]	[ ˈkwɑlu ], then [ ˈkwɑlu ]	qwá·lu	[ qwá·lu ] & [ ˈqwɑˑlu ]
Instant Phonetic Englishization: KWAH_loo, QWAH_loo for Mrs. Peterson, where the q is farther back in the throat.

The k-q Sound Correspondence: This is one of several examples of a sound correspondence in Milluk whereby Annie Miner Peterson has a uvular consonant in her pronunciation of a Milluk word and Lolly Metcalf’s Coos Bay Milluk pronunciation of the same word has a velar consonant matching Mrs. Peterson’s uvular consonant. The Hanis language shares this sound correspondence with Coos Bay Milluk agreeing in having a velar consonant in quite a few words where Annie Miner Peterson’s pronunciations of the Milluk words have a uvular consonant.

The Sound Correspondence with a Twist: In this case though, with the Milluk word meaning ‘belly button’, there is a twist. When we look at Melville Jacobs’ slip-file dictionary, we see that Mrs. Peterson has a Milluk word [ qwá·lu ] ‘navel’, ‘umbilical cord’ matching her Hanis word [ gwə́ʔla ] ‘navel’, ‘umbilical cord’. The Hanis word begins with a voiced velar stop [ g ], instead of the expected voiceless velar stop [ k ]. There are two differences with this consonant, instead of there being just one difference. In other words, Hanis and Coos Bay Milluk do not agree. They have different words meaning ‘belly button’.

Having just one difference with the consonant is standard in the overall sound correspondence, but here we have multiple differences between the Milluk word and the Hanis word. So Lolly’s Coos Bay Milluk word is quite different from the Hanis word. After all, Hanis and Milluk are two different languages. This word demonstrates that.

It happens that when Hanis and Milluk words are being compared because the words resemble each other, it is usual to find multiple differences. Moreover, many Hanis and Milluk words which mean the same thing are completely different.

We already know that in Coos historical linguistics generally there are a welter of sometimes seemingly contradictory sound correspondences between Hanis and Milluk, rather than a neat set of regular sound correspondences. That has everything to do with the likelihood that the Hanis language and the Milluk language were in contact with each other continuously since the time when they were neighboring dialects of the same language quite possibly spoken along the shores of Coos Bay quite possibly one or even two thousand years ago. We are bold enough to suggest that time depth because Hanis and Milluk are arguably more different than Spanish and Portuguese, neighboring languages which are both daughter languages of Latin which was definitely a single language two thousand years ago, but whose local dialects gradually became separate languages over the centuries since then.