‘a woman’s dress’,

easily written as:     waeetlh’   

for AMP:   

     waeetlh’

Lolly Metcalf’s South Slough Milluk

Annie Miner Peterson’s Milluk

Americanist Phonetic

 IPA

Exactly Jacobs’ transcription

Americanist Phonetic & IPA

[ we·tɫʼ ],

 then

[ wæ·tɫʼ ]

[ weˑtɬʼ ],

 then

[ wæˑtɬʼ ]

wɛ́·tʼɫ

Modernized: wɛ́·tɫʼ  

 [ wæ·tɫʼ ]

              &

[ wæˑtɬʼ ]

Instant Phonetic Englishization:  wattl!. 



A High Example of the Phoneme / æ /:  Lolly Metcalf’s first pronunciation of this word is not the one to imitate.  It probably does not count as an outright mispronunciation though, because the phonetic vowel [ e ] is one of the natural pronunciations of the Milluk phonemic vowel that we write as / æ /.  Moreover, this is only a borderline, very low example of the phonetic vowel [ e ], almost qualifying as across the border into the vowel space of [ æ ], as a very high instance of [ æ ].  Notice that it seems as if Lolly is stretching as she says the word this first time, and then she takes a deep breath.  It is as if her tongue got pushed up a bit as she stretched and got ready to take the deep breath.  

An Excellent Example of [ tɬ’ ]:  Lolly’ second pronunciation of the word, which we transcribe phonetically as [ wæˑtɬʼ ] (IPA) is the one to imitate.  This token of the word ends with an especially clear example of an ejective consonant, in this case an ejective lateral affricate.  It is generally difficult to hear whether an affricate consonant is an ejective or not.  Affricates have their own kind of noisy release which gets in the way of hearing the popping sound of an ejective.  With this word, Lolly gives us an especially good example of a word ending with the ejective lateral affricate [ tɬ’ ].  Compare this word with the Milluk word meaning ‘feather, feathers’ where Lolly gives us a rather clear example of a word ending with the non-ejective lateral affricate [ tɬ ].