In this interview segment, Lolly Metcalf’s first pronunciation of the Milluk word that means ‘feather, feathers’ is the odd one out of the four times in the interview that she says the word.  The phonetic vow­el [ i ] in Lolly’s first token of this word is not the lower and lax vowel [ ɪ ] that she has in her other pronunciations of the word, although it is only a marginal example of a tense vowel and of the higher and more front vowel shape [ i ].  The vowel in this token of the word is also not an example of a long vowel, even though in Milluk, the vowel shape [ I ] is associated with vowel length.  

When we listen just to the part of this token of the word before the release of the affricate, something that we can easily do with an Audacity sound file, we can hear a marginal example of the English word ‘wheat’.  Lolly Metcalf’s other three tokens of this word in the interview all have the slightly lower and lax vowel [ ɪ ], so that we can hear the English word ‘wit’ pretty clearly in those three pronunciations of the word, before the release of the affricate.  

Compare this word meaning ‘feather, feathers’ with the Milluk word meaning ‘dress’, specifically ‘a woman’s dress’.  In the Milluk texts, all of which are from Annie Miner Peterson, the only difference between these two words is that the word meaning ‘dress’ ends with an ejective lateral affricate [tɬʼ] and the word meaning ‘feather, feathers’ ends with a plain lateral affricate [tɬ].  In Lolly Metcalf’s South Slough Milluk, on the other hand, there is also a different vowel in the word meaning ‘feather, feathers’.  Moreover, it is a short vowel in Lolly Metcalf’s version of the word meaning ‘feather, feathers’, while it is the long vowel [ æˑ ] in both Annie Miner Peterson’s word meaning ‘feather, feathers’ and in her word meaning ‘dress, dresses’.