Hallowspeak Update 36

Alrighty fellas! The Hallowspeak Project has seen some big new events in the past month, which I’m really excited to share with all of you! Just a heads up though, this update won’t contain new discoveries for The Hallowspeak Project – it’s mostly Project news. But, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any new analysis stuff here… 

First though, background. About a month ago, mossbag made a video that mentioned The Hallowspeak Project, and even showed our website!! And, while we knew that this was going to cause a bunch of people to join the public server, we didn’t anticipate just how huge the surge of new members was going to be!!

Not even two hours after the video was posted, we received more than twenty new members flooding into the Hallowspeak channel! It was incredible to see so many new people engaging with the Project and asking questions. Getting to interact with curious members in the community is really one of my favourite parts of Hallowspeak!

And, on top of that, I was ecstatic to see people who had thought that Hallowspeak was abandoned finding out that we’re still going! After we stopped posting on reddit, so many people assumed that we just stopped working on Hallowspeak, and that the Project was abandoned. Any posts trying to let people know that we just moved platforms were seen by really few people. 

I’m so glad people are realising that we’re still going, and love how we’re starting to form a bigger Hallowspeak community! Thank you so much for the shoutout mossbag!

One of the biggest events to happen this month is related to Hollow Knight: Silksong. I definitely remembered to add the expandable thing to hide it from people who don’t want to see Silksong stuff before posting this!

Click to show Silksong related content

For the first time ever, the Hallowspeak channel was filled with people sharing their own theories about the language and discussing our analyses. It was the most active the channel has ever been! One discussion really stuck out though. It started just as some side analysis of Midwife’s voice lines (which aren’t in Hallowspeak), but kept growing and growing into something really impressive.

A few of the new people who had joined from the mossbag video started The Loomsong Project. That’s right. With only the voice lines from Midwife, and incredibly attentive watchings of the trailers, people have already started analysing the phonology and even bits of grammar for the languages spoken in Silksong! This is assuming that Pharloom is the homeland of the weavers, and so the lines from the weavers in Hallownest are the same language as the one in Pharloom, if not, a closely related language.

Now, I’ll hand it over to the new Head of The Loomspeak Project, Maple, to give you all the first ever Loomsong Update!

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Thanks Mish! 

Hi everyone, I’m Maple and I’m currently working on a little side project to Hallowspeak called Loomsong which will be focused on the spoken language of Pharloom and the weavers as opposed to Hallownest and its inhabitants. The Loomsong project, like Hallowspeak, aims to construct a language by analysing voice-lines and in-game dialogue. The main difference, however, is that while Hallowspeak has a monumental number of voice lines, Loomsong so far has a total of twelve. :0

So far, with the help of many server members including justaguy#0082, SouthBranch (leaf), Einradfahrer#8259, гоблин#3313, penguin#0194 and some others I couldn’t find the names of, we have made considerable progress!

So far through a coordinated effort of listening to the same twelve voice lines a million times until we were driven crazy, we were able to discern the pronunciations of the voice-lines which I then plugged into a table for easy reference.

After knowing exactly what we were hearing, we could start looking for patterns in the voice lines and so far we’ve formulated a couple theories but before I tell you them just make sure to keep in mind that none of this is final and everything is possible to change! And with that, I’ll tell you what we may have figured out: we have a theory for a possible word order with verbs at the ends of sentences like in japanese, we have some theories for the definitions of a couple of the lines and we even have the potential beginnings of what might be a case system (still up for debate). Currently, we’re working on refining the verb endings for tense and aspect (e.g -ed being past-tense)

And with that I’m done, maybe you’ll hear  from me again soon! But if you want, you can come join us in the Loomsong thread of the Hallowspeak chat, read the F.A.Q in the pins and join in! Now back to you in the studio Mish! Thanks for having me. 

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Awesome, Maple! What an unbelievable project! 

With so many engaged and skilled new members to the Hallowspeak Community, there were also a few others that really stood out! These were people that showed real interest in The Hallowspeak Project and wanted to invest themselves in it, and also who showed a real level of expertise in the Hallowspeak public channel. If you don’t know, these are the requirements for us to ask you to join the Team!

First, there was Clockwise who, after seeing mossbag’s video, actually reached out to us on reddit. Straight away, Clockwise surprised us with his linguistic qualifications. He hung around in the Hallowspeak public channel and talked about his experience with linguistics. The interview was pretty much just ceremonial, and we ran through it to get him hired. Now, Clockwise marks the first ever member of the Hallowspeak Team with an actual degree in linguistics!! 

Yeah, none of our members have ever had academic qualifications in linguistics: we were all just hobbyists (and yes, linguistics hobbyists exist lol). It was only recently that a couple of our members actually started studying linguistics in university. So when Clockwise messaged us on reddit saying he had an actual degree, we were all blown away!

After that, a member called Leaf joined, and quickly started helping out with the early stages of Loomsong, listening to the voice lines and trying to transcribe them so that they can be transcribed. On top of showing some really great technical skill in linguistics, they also started to use a software called Praat to actually analyse the waveforms and spectrograms of the lines to figure out exactly what sounds are being said! None of the other members of the Team knew how to use Praat, and certainly wouldn’t have the expertise to even start to understand spectrograms, so this was really incredible to see!

And last but not least, is Koguri. Now, Koguri isn’t a new member coming from the mossbag video – far from it. They’ve been thoroughly engaged in The Hallowspeak Project for ages now. We had been planning on hiring them for months, and we even told them! We just… uh.. kept forgetting. But now they’re finally part of the Team!

You can check out the member bios for all four of our new Team Members over on the bios page! 

Last on the agenda, we’ve revisited something more Project related from a while ago. Ages ago, in a previous update, we asked all of you guys for ideas on a Hallowspeak mascot, and recently we got to thinking about what a mascot for the Project would look like. We went through a few ideas, trying to figure out what kind of character would best represent Hallowspeak.

We needed to figure out a species first of course, and we needed one that would have something to do with linguistics. And eventually, we decided on bees! Bees in real life show a kind of language that they use to communicate with their friends about where the nicest flowers are, and also I just like bees a lot! 

We made a few designs for a bee mascot which you can see here!

After that though, a few members had some other ideas. A few didn’t like the mascot being a bee since that doesn’t really make much sense in terms of Hollow Knight’s story, since no other bee has ever left the Hive to join Hallownest. But the more exciting opposition to the bee mascot, is the idea that there could be a different mascot for each aspect of the project! For example, the bee character could be for phonology, and we could have another character for grammar, and another for the lexicon! 

Here are some of the other character ideas we had! That green paint is Maple’s idea to have like a ‘hunter’s mark’ to tie them all together! (and also for anyone else who wants to make their own linguist oc!)

None of this is really set in stone right now: we’re still discussing what we want to represent the Project. If you want to join in the discussion or offer your ideas, come over to The Shellwood Ordeal discord server! (linked in the contact page).

There is in fact a bit more stuff we did since the last update, but I feel like it wouldn’t fit in here. Plus, when I write updates, I like to write the whole story, and some of the new theories have only just gotten off the ground. So the things that were discussed in the Hallowspeak Live that happened on the 24th of October will be in the next update. 

As is almost tradition at this point, I have to apologise for how long this update took. It was already tonnes more work than the others; the four new member bios and the reveal drawings for the mascot had to be done before the update could be posted. But alongside that, working on the update fell right in the middle of having my IG exams for maths and my mocks for the rest of my subjects, which pretty much put a stop to the progress of writing this.

That’s it for now! Tune in next time folks!