This week on the update, we’re gonna have a bit of a special. With all this work across over a year now, there’s been countless discoveries in the Project; but all you’ve seen has been, well, updates! You’ve only seen small little bits adding on top of the progress that we had already made before the start of these Hallowspeak Updates, so I thought for Christmas Day I would show off all the past progress that’s led up to where the Project is today.
And what better phrase to use to demonstrate all this progress than a festive wish:
Akala em bis kanamo Krismysak namino mejea!
hope-[1S] CMPL very AUG-good NAME-ACC have-2PL person-VOC-PL“I hope you all have a really great Christmas guys!”
First, just before we break down the history that led to this phrase: That weird looking code thing in the code block is what’s known as a gloss. A gloss is a breakdown of a phrase that linguists can use to understand how a phrase is put together. Those capital letters all stand for a grammatical affix (prefix or suffix): PL for plural; 2 for second person; etc.
Now, let’s go in chronological order. Before we could uncover any grammar, or any words, we needed to figure out Hallowspeak’s sounds and rules for those sounds, called phonology. That beginning analysis was done by none other than DB, who as well as being our best member, is also the first person to join the Team after I started it. He analysed all the voice lines which we got from a YouTube playlist, and tried to figure out which sounds are unique and which are variations of the same sound, which allowed him to construct a phonetic inventory. Then, he looked at which combinations of sounds appear in the voice lines and how syllables are organised, which he analysed to figure out the phonotactics.
After a few revisions, we use this phonology to transcribe all the voice lines even more accurately. Then, we used it to make a set of non-canonical Hallowspeak words. Obviously, we don’t have enough words to be able to translate any possible request, so we use these non-canonical words to fill in the gaps. They aren’t directly from the voice lines, but are made up using the phonology that we analysed. The word “namo” (“good”) is one of those words.
Another use for the phonology of Hallowspeak is to loan words from other languages into Hallowspeak, mostly names. For “Christmas”, it doesn’t change all too much: “kr” is an allowed cluster, and “s” is allowed at the end of a syllable. The only issue is that “t” which wouldn’t be allowed, but no one pronounces it anyway. The second “a” in Christmas is more like an “uh” sound, so I use “y” for it which makes that sound. Therefore, we get “Krismys”.
After the phonology, we started looking through the transcribed lines to try and figure out some words. In the beginning, when we had nearly nothing, it was mostly a guessing game trying to figure out what meanings would fit in context. That’s when we figured out “akala” (“hope”) and “em” (“that”) from Elderbug, and “ka-“ which is an augmentative like “great/big” from the NailmastersThings like augmentatives that allow you to make new words from other words are really useful for translation requests since they can allow us to get closer to what we’re trying to translate.
Once we’d acquired a few words, we decided to move on to grammar. One of the first things we noticed was the “-ak” suffix which we thought was the accusative case, marking the object of a sentence. From that small start, the grammar expanded more and more, including verb endings. That “-ino” suffix was a verb ending at this point, but it was an abilitative “can”, because we interpreted Cloth’s “nadino sonino” as being disappointed that she can’t do something.
Another really early discovery was the vocative “-je”, basically a suffix to indicate that you’re talking to something, from “trosje kalimo”. That’s where we get the “je” in “mejea”. That little bit of grammar stayed from the very earliest stages of the Project until now, but many other things didn’t survive. It was around this time that it happened: the Great Hallowspeak Reset.
Well, not a full hard reset, but we put everything we had on the table to be changed. And we changed a lot. By comparing new things to see if old things still held up, we found that many of our older discoveries weren’t accurate, including that “-ino”. We then saw that there was also an “-in”, which reminded us of how “-eku” (the third person verb ending) also has an “-ek” for plurality, so we changed it to the second person. That’s where the “ino” in “namino” comes from.
Unfortunately, after this, there was a huge period where we made very minimal progress, which we affectionately refer to as “the Great Hallowspeak Cheddening”. We like naming our events “great”. So to get things rolling again, we started Project Zote: a shorter term goal to fully analyse Zote’s big speech. From this, we got many words, like “bis” (“very”), and confirmation of “name” for “have”. We had already been thinking it was some common word like “have”, but this is when we agreed upon that specific meaning.
From this smaller mini-project, we also learnt a lot about Hallowspeak’s word order. That’s kinda hard though when you don’t understand most of the words. The way we did it is by looking at which words have verb endings and which have cases. The ones with verb endings are obviously verbs, and the ones with cases are nouns. That’s how we figured out Hallowspeak’s word order as OVS (Object Verb Subject), and that adjectives come before nouns.
Now the final pieces, “me” for person and “-a” for the plural; you were here to see them be discovered! Now, we have all the pieces.
“Akala em” from the very first analyses of the voice lines. “Bis” from Project Zote. “Ka” from the very beginning and “namo” as one of the non-canonical words that we needed for translation requests. “Krismys” from the phonology reconstructed by DB at the very start of the Project, when he and I were the only members!! “Ak” from before the big reset and “name” and “ino” from after!! “Me” from just a few months ago, and “je” as one of the first ever bits of grammar we found!!! “-a” from so recently, that it’s part of a still ongoing investigation!!!!
Akala em bis kanamo Krismysak namino mejea!”
I hope you all have a really great Christmas guys!!!!!
Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!!