Holy CRAP i am so sorry there hasn’t been an update in so long. I know I said that there won’t be a consistent schedule anymore, but this is maybe a bit too far :p
In any case, we have some follow-up on last update’s “-n” suffix related confusion! We were confused not just on what case it meant, but whether it even is a case!! It seemed to appear in places we’d expect a different case to appear, and it didn’t even go in the same place on the noun as the other cases!!
We’d said we might want to look into the “mexemno (es) kucin” line from Cornifer, since it appears twice, one with the “es”, and one without, which we thought might give us some clues as to what the “-n” suffix is!
But even after constructing ? syntax trees ? for the sentences, we didn’t get any clues from this strange pair of phrases. However, we did come to understand them better!
That “x” sound, not like the English “x” that’s like “ks”, but the “ch” sound in “loch”; it is an extremely rare sound in Hallowspeak. We basically only see it in Nailmasters’ “gexwal nedokax” and Godseeker’s “odo krax, banadana krax” lines.
But wait…. I don’t know if it’s just me, but those “-ax”s feel suspiciously like the “-ak” that is seen on so many Hallowspeak words, for the accusative case! And the “x” sound is just the fricated version of a “k” sound! A plosive sound becoming a fricative at the end of a word? That’s like a super regular, almost stereotypical sound change!
That’s right! We found out a sound change in Hallowspeak that happened maybe centuries before the game! That means the “mexemno (es) kucin” line is actually “mek emno (es) kucin”!
That’s not the main discovery we had however! Looking closer at that “emno” word, it seems to have two cases on it! Whatever the “-n” suffix is, as well as the dative “-o” suffix… keep that in mind.
In figuring out the meaning of both words and grammatical elements, its always crucial to look at the context in game that the voice lines are said
So we did! And noticed something about the line “akoman ja” from Sly, which is said over a few lines of dialogue to do with going down the well and generally the stuff under the surface of Dirtmouth.
So, a location huh? My fellow linguists will know where this is going hehe
And that double case weirdness with the dative “o” and the “n” on “emno”? Well in most languages with cases, each case does more than just it’s default function. And a common extra function for the dative case, is one of movement to a different location. Think about how the word “to” in English serves both a dative meaning, showing the recipient of the verb, as well as a location related one, showing that someone is going to somewhere!
This location related case is called a locative case, and it explains a lot of the weirdness we’ve seen from the “n” suffix!
Why does the “n” case sometimes appear where we’d expect a different case? Well the location of an action is an adjunct argument, meaning it’s not a necessary, core part of the phrase. And adjunct arguments often have much more freedom in their position in the sentence than core arguments! You can say “In England, it rains a lot”, and “It rains a lot in England”; but while you can say “I saw the rain”, you can’t say “Saw the rain I”.
Why does the “n” suffix appear on top of another case? Well case stacking is a thing that happens in some languages, and stacking the dative and the locative makes a lot of sense, for showing that extra meaning of the dative!
It seems this theory is almost completely sound! As with all our theories though, we need to first check if it fits all the places we see it in the voice lines, and that’s what we’re working on doing now!
Heh, sorry about how messy all of that progress update stuff was. We don’t really just work on each theory linearly: there are often loads of tangents we go off on researching, dead ends everywhere, and smaller theories that we try, before arriving at the main path! Sometimes it’s hard to put that all together into one coherent story for these updates :p
Anyways, that’s the progress we’ve done on the language, but of course the huge big thing that happened since last update is the Official Hallowspeak Website finally being put live! That’s right, after months of work, you can now visit hallowspeak.com to see information on how to read Hallowspeak, how to help us out, how to contact us, who we are, and so much more! We even have all the Hallowspeak Updates there for convenient reading!
That’s it for today folks! Tune in next time!
…which hopefully won’t be in another two months.