A Voiceless Un-Aspirated Stop Consonant:  In practice, Jacobs did not make a phonetic distinction between the lightly aspirated stop consonants, such as [ tʰ ] in Milluk words such as [ tʰuˑya ] ‘fall’, which occur at the very beginnings of a few Milluk words and voiceless un-aspirated stop consonants such as the [ t ] in this word [ stuˑq ], which we hear from Lolly as [ stuˑk ], where the [ t ] occurs after a word-initial [ s ].  We make a point of making this distinction on this website.  Compare the English word ‘top’ [ tʰɑˑp ] and the English word ‘stop’ [ stɑˑp ].  The [ t ] in ‘stop’ sounds a lot like a [ d ], but it is not actually a voiced stop consonant.  To really test this out, compare the English words ‘kill’ [ kʰɪl ] , ‘skill’ [ skɪl ], and ‘gill’ [ gɪl ], which are phonetically identical except for this three-way phonetic distinction.  English and Milluk are alike in making this distinction.  When we look at how Jacobs wrote different forms of the Milluk word meaning ‘stand’ we see that he heard the [ t ] of this word sometimes as a | t | and sometimes as a | d |.  This tell us that Annie Miner Peterson must have had the same kind of voiceless un-aspirated [ t ] in this word as we hear from Lolly Metcalf.  

Lolly Metcalf was both a native speaker of English and of Milluk.  Annie Miner Peterson, however, only learned English as a youg adult, so we can infer that Milluk speakers who never learned English were like Lolly Metcalf in having this three-way phonetic distinction between lightly aspirated stop consonants word-initially, as opposed to voiceless un-aspirated stop consonants after word-initial [ s ], in contrast with voiced stop consonants word-initially.  As we say, this is a phonetic distinction which just happens to be the same in Milluk and in English.  

It is a whole other story what happens in the middle of words, between vowels, and before voiceless consonants, such as [ s ], and what happens at the ends of words.  What happens in English is not just the same as what happens in Milluk.  What we see of the Milluk word meaning ‘stand’ in the Milluk texts provides some good evidence of what the story is in Milluk.