‘He/she/it swallowed it/him/her’,

easy way to type it:    gwaanii

Lolly Metcalf’s South Slough Milluk

Americanist Phonetic

 IPA

[ gwá·ni ],

 then

[ gwá·ni ],

 then

[ gwá·ni ]

[ ˈɡwɑˑni ],

 then

[ ˈɡwɑˑni ],

 then

[ ˈɡwɑˑni ]





Instant Phonetic Englishization:  gwah_nee for Lolly’s Coos Bay Milluk pronunciation with its velar and heavy pronunciation of the uvular ejective that Annie has in her pronunciation of the word. 


We really mean it to say in our translation of this one-word Milluk sentence that it can mean ‘It swallowed him’ as one of its meanings.  In a Milluk text there is a sentence which ends with this clause: 

tsú‿qʼwá·ni‿tƚɛ‿x̣‿tsʼɛ́hem.  

so_swallowed.him_the_ERG_whale 

and the whale swallowed him.  

In our interlinear line of literal translation, the abbreviation ERG stands for the grammatical term ‘ergative’.  The word meaning ‘whale’ is the subject of a transitive verb in Milluk, which called for the ergative particle x̣, which itself literally means ‘from’.  One might say that the action of the verb is literally coming from the whale.  

for AMP:   

     qʼwaanii

Annie Miner Peterson’s Milluk

Exactly Jacobs’ transcription

Americanist Phonetic & IPA

 qʼwá·ni

[ qʼwá·ni ]

              &

[ ˈqʼwɑˑni ]