Miluk language
Miluk, also known as Lower Coquille from its location, is one of two Coosan languages. 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 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. The name míluk is the endonym, derived from a village name. The last fully fluent speaker of Miluk was Annie Miner Peterson, 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, and was an informant to Morris Swadesh for his Penutian Vocabulary Survey.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonant inventory of Miluk can be tabulated as follows, based on Douglas-Tavani :- may also range to uvular in free variation.
- /,, / are also heard as geminated . Gemination may be phonemic in Miluk, but Jacobs 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.
Vowels
- is pronounced between and, but it tends towards the latter.
- // is pronounced somewhere between and, likely often pronounced centrally as .
- // is sometimes articulated as or, though these appear in free variation with .
- // and // have a proven minimal pair and are therefore distinct phonemes, despite Jacobs originally considering them as two allophones of one phoneme.
- // 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.
Grammar
Syntax
Verb - Argument Order
Miluk verbs have a tendency to be clause-initial. Arguments that are expressed with overt noun phrases usually follow the verb, while pronominal arguments expressed are encoded in clitics 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 .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 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
- referring to elders.
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-.
| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
| 1 | w- | s- | ɬ- |
| 1 | w- | nə- | ɬ- |
| 2 | nə- | is- | čil- |
| 3 | Ø | ič- | iɬ- |
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.