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T:transitive marker EST:established
Miluk, also known as Lower Coquille from its location, is one of two
Coosan languages Coosan () is a townland and suburb north of Athlone, County Westmeath in Ireland. Coosan, which is situated on the shores of Lough Ree, is surrounded by water on three sides and bordered by Athlone on the fourth. Coosan attracts tourists over t ...
. It shares more than half of its vocabulary with Hanis, though these are not always obvious, and grammatical differences cause the two languages to look quite different. Miluk started being displaced by
Athabaskan Athabaskan ( ; also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large branch of the Na-Dene language family of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, ...
in the late 18th century, and many Miluk shifted to Athabaskan and Hanis. Miluk was spoken around the lower Coquille River and the South Slough of
Coos Bay Coos Bay (Hanis language, Coos language: Atsixiis or Hanisich) is an estuary where the Coos River enters the Pacific Ocean, the estuary is approximately 12 miles long and up to two miles wide. It is the largest estuary completely within Oregon sta ...
. The name ''míluk'' is the endonym, derived from a village name. The last fully fluent speaker of Miluk was
Annie Miner Peterson Annie Miner Peterson (1860–1939) was a Coos Indian from the U.S. state of Oregon who was a cultural and linguistic consultant to Melville Jacobs, an anthropologist at the University of Washington. Personal life Annie was born in 1860 of a Coo ...
, who died in 1939. She knew both Miluk and Hanis, and made a number of recordings. Laura Hodgkiss Metcalf, who died in 1961, was the last functional speaker (her mother was Miluk), and was an informant to
Morris Swadesh Morris Swadesh ( ; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics, and developed his mature career at UNAM in Mexico. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewi ...
for his Penutian Vocabulary Survey.


Phonology


Consonants

The consonant inventory of Miluk can be tabulated as follows, based on Douglas-Tavani (2024): * may also range to uvular in
free variation In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such ...
. * /, , / are also heard as geminated ,
Gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
may be
phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
in Miluk, but Jacobs (1939 & 1940) transcribed few instances of these geminate sonorants. Some words transcribed with , in the data are also transcribed at other times with , while some words are transcribed consistently as geminated and never as their shorter counterparts. Due to this ambiguity, the geminate sonorants are listed here as
allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosi ...
.


Vowels

* is pronounced between [] and [], but it tends towards the latter. Jacobs, Melville. (1939). ''Coos narrative and ethnologic texts''. University of Washington publications in anthropology (Vol. 8, No. 1). Seattle, WA: University of Washington. *// is pronounced somewhere between [] and [], likely often pronounced centrally as [Open central unrounded vowel, ä]. *// is sometimes articulated as [] or [], though these appear in free variation with []. *// and // have a proven minimal pair (''wii='' 'thus' & ''wi'' 'who') and are therefore distinct phonemes, despite Jacobs originally considering them as two allophones of one phoneme.Jacobs, Melville. (1940). ''Coos myth texts''. University of Washington publications in anthropology (Vol. 8, No. 2). Seattle, WA: University of Washington. *// and // have no exact minimal pair but do have minimal environments. In general, words are consistently pronounced with // and // without variation, and this lack of a minimal pair can therefore be most plausibly described as a result of documentation gaps. Therefore, they are listed here as separate phonemes.
Vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...
occurs in Miluk, although sporadic. The most common occurrence of vowel harmony in Miluk is the harmonization of in roots with in suffixes.


Grammar


Syntax


Verb - Argument Order

Miluk verbs have a tendency to be clause-initial.
Arguments An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persua ...
that are expressed with overt noun phrases usually follow the verb, while pronominal arguments expressed are encoded in
clitics In Morphology (linguistics), morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , Back-formation, backformed from Ancient Greek, Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) ...
that attach to the verb. Absolutive and ergative arguments can be interchangeable. The following example shows the ergative argument before the absolutive argument. However, in the next example, the absolutive argument precedes the ergative argument.


Order Variation in Presentational Constructions

Miluk often uses a presentational construction when telling stories or recounting an event to bring attention to the subject of the story. As a result of this, the affected noun phrase is fronted in the sentence and often appears clause-initially. The following examples are of the presentational construction, with the presented construction bolded.


Possessive Order

In Miluk, the possessive noun phrase precedes what is possessed. The possessed noun takes no article but instead is marked with the oblique ə


Morphology

There are two articles in Miluk, kʷə and ʎə. ʎə is used with nouns that are closer to the speaker, while kʷə is used for nouns which are more distant. These articles do not reflect a gender of a noun and both articles have been found in use for the same noun in discourse. Verbs have intransitive, imperfect, and perfect marker. Verbs which are intransitive take the -u suffix, while the imperfect tense takes the -ʔi suffix and the perfect tense takes the -t suffix.


Morphosyntactic Alignment

Miluk has an ergative–absolutive distinction, expressed morphologically; the suffix ''-x'' denotes the ergative case in Miluk, and the absolutive case is unmarked. In the following examples, the ergative argument comes before the absolutive argument. Miluk allows for the opposite to occur, as we see the absolutive argument precede the ergative argument.


Gender, Number, Person

Miluk does not have a masculine/feminine gender distinction, but it does have reflexives of an old gender system. The language reflects this old system in two instances: with a suffix that follows articles (-č) and in lexical items for male and female people throughout life. The suffix -č has been seen to be optional but occurs in three instances: # following a feminine noun, # referring to a young person, and (the most common) # referring to elders. The second place where Miluk holds on to an older gender system is when referring to males or females. Words for males often begin with /t/, while the female words often begin with /hu/ and /w/. Miluk has no marked third person clitic on verbs. This is flouted as presentational fronting occurs whenever a new argument is introduced, which are the sentences most likely to have two third-person arguments, and sentences uttered after this argument has been introduced that have two third-person arguments will only express the defocused one through an overt noun phrase, while the other is understood through context within the discourse rather than through a co-indexed clitic. Miluk has an inclusive and exclusive distinction when it comes to the dual possessive. In the first person dual inclusive, the words receive the circumfix s=nə-, while the first person dual exclusive receives the prefix nə-.


Space, Time, Modality

There are two morphemes which can be added to a verb to mark tense. The morpheme ''han'' indicates the prospective tense, which describes that an event is going to occur. The other morpheme that can be added to a verb is ''hanƛ'', which marks the future tense. The future tense is distinguished from the prospective tense and has appeared irrealis marker a ̆x. The order in which the morphemes appear are the pronominal clitics, followed by mood, tense and then aspect. In the following examples, "han" indicates that an event is going to occur.


Obliques

The morpheme tə marks an oblique or possessive, which occurs throughout the Salish language family. The following two example reveals -tə acting as the oblique marker.


Status

The Miluk language is now extinct. The last speakers were two sisters, Lolly Hotchkiss and Daisy Wasson Codding. The two worked with a linguist in 1953 to record words from the language but the two were not fluent in adulthood, and had trouble remembering words. The last native speaker was Annie Miner Peterson, who knew both Miluk and Hanis. Annie Peterson's first language was Miluk, and in 1930, Annie Miner Peterson began working with Melville Jacobs and the two produced two volumes of texts in both dialects of Coos. ''Coos Narrative and Ethnographic Texts'' and ''Coos Myth Texts'' were the two publications were published, but the two publications did not have any linguistic analysis. The books only provided English translations to the texts.


References

*Wurm, Mühlhäusler, & Tryon, 1996. ''Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia and the Americas'', p. 1148.


Bibliography

* Jacobs, Melville. (1939). ''Coos narrative and ethnologic texts''. University of Washington publications in anthropology (Vol. 8, No. 1). Seattle, WA: University of Washington. * Jacobs, Melville. (1940). ''Coos myth texts''. University of Washington publications in anthropology (Vol. 8, No. 2). Seattle, WA: University of Washington. * Anderson, Troy. (1990). ''Miluk Dictionary''. Stanford Library. Green Library Stacks. PM961 .A53 1990


External links

* * * * {{Penutian languages Coosan languages Languages extinct in the 20th century 20th-century disestablishments in Oregon