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Hallowspeak Update 18

Unfortunately, there’s been no huge big breakthrough this week, however I do have a small possible connection between two of our biggest questions!

Last week, we went over the big question of noun morphology in loads of detail. Then, I explained a possible solution to the problem, that being austronesian alignment. If you haven’t read last week’s update, I’d recommend you do so, so that you can understand this one. Now remember, that’s not Hallowspeak’s only big question! Another discovery that we’ve been thoroughly confused about was an incredibly bizarre couple of words: “curo name”.

Those two words “curo name”, appear one together in Quirrel’s lines as “tocuro namyn”, and multiple times in Zote’s big speech as “becuro namyn” and “curo namyn”. This sequence of words always stumps us when trying to decipher those lines. The reason? It means “to be have”. Uh… what?? Quirrel’s line’s one says “you are have yourself”, and Zote’s ones mean “I am have yourself” and “it is have yourself”. What the fuck does that mean?????

The first thing that everyone in the Hallowspeak Team thought was that this was some sort of grammatical construction. While many grammatical meanings are encoded as affixes (prefixes and suffixes and some other funny types), like -ed for past tense in English, other meanings are sometimes encoded as a grammatical construction, using multiple words. For example in English, saying that you “have done” something, seems a little weird. You “have walked”? How you do have walking? Walking isn’t an object, how do you have an action? That doesn’t make sense literally, but it’s just the grammatical construction for the English Perfect aspect. This type of grammatical construction using a helping verb is called an auxilliary.

Since the verb combination “is have yourself” is completely nonsensical, we thought that it could be an auxiliary like that. And now that we have the idea of austronesian alignment, we’re thinking that there could be a connection.

Let me explain: Just because austronesian alignment forbids certain orders of subjects and objects, doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to say those things! For example, a sentence like “The rock killed me” would go against the animacy hierarchy; an inanimate object doing something to something animate. So in order to say that, languages with austronesian alignment have to swap it around to make the animate thing the subject.

One of the most common ways to do that is using valency changing operations. The valency of a verb is how many arguments it can take. For example “He saw you” has two arguments: “he” and “you”, so it’s transitive. However “you were seen” can only have one argument: “you”, so it’s intransitive, and the “he” has to be added back in with the word “by”. As you can see, the valency of that verb was changed, and this specific type of valency changing operation is called a passive!

So in order to say the sentence “The rock killed me”, in a language with austronesian alignment, you’d say “I was killed by the rock”. Now, I don’t know if this is just me, but that weird “is have yourself” sorta seems like a possible passive construction! “Is” is a common auxiliary verb used for passive constructions, so could it be that?

This is honestly just completely speculation, but it would be really great if we could prove it! It would solve two of Hallowspeak’s big questions!

That’s all for this week! Tune in next time!!

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