With the Milluk word that means ‘little’, ‘small’, we are compelled to recognize Front K as a phoneme / k̯ / in Milluk, in order not to add an additional vowel phoneme into our phonemic analysis of Milluk.  If we represent the Milluk word eik’ ‘little’, ‘small’, which is phonetically [ ʔe·k̯ʼ ] as / ʔæk̯ʼ / in a phonemic representation, then we can predict the phonetic vowel [ e ] that we hear from Lolly Metcalf in this word as an allophone of the Milluk vowel phoneme / æ /.  The palatalized nature of the Front K phoneme / k̯ / conditions the higher vowel height, just as the high front vowel of the noun suffix / -is / conditions the higher vowel height that we hear from Annie Miner Peterson in the several times in the phonographic recordings that we hear her say the word / gwæis / ‘girl, young woman’ as [ gwɛis ] and especially as [ gweis ].  The variation that we hear from Lolly Metcalf in her pronunciations of the Milluk word yeis ‘mouth’ shows us that there is a range of vowel heights that can be heard for that word.   

With the Milluk word ktsaas ‘ashes’ on the other hand, the front k which begins the word conditions what follows it, making for the kind of transition between the consonants at the beginning of that word, which we consistently hear from Lolly as involving [ ɪ̥ ] a voiceless high front vowel.  In other words, because the word meaning ‘ashes’ begins with a front k [k̯], the transition between the initial consonant [ k̯ ] and the following affricate consonant [ ts ] sounds like a whispered version of the English word ‘kit’.