Hallowspeak Update 38

Strap yourselves in for a huge whirlwind of news this update!! Loads of stuff has happened in the past month!! Actually, so much has happened that this update will be split into two parts – the second part being next month’s update (since i’ll be really busy next month lol).

Rather than buckling down and actually figuring out the details of how the -n suffix works, we decided – as always – to start a new line of inquiry in order to procrastinate on it! This all started when we noticed something in Tiso’s line “sarena negeno”. 

From a few updates ago, we know that this means “there is peace instead of violence”, where “sare” means peace and “negen” means violence. The thing is, we see a similar word – “nego” in Hornet’s line “kala negosa tros” and Moss Prophet’s “gel nego bezo”. In these sentences, it seems like this is the same word – “neg” – but being used as a noun in Tiso’s line, and as a verb in the other two.

Looking a bit deeper, the ones where it’s a verb use “nego”, with a verb ending if needed. However when it’s a noun, it’s “negeno”. The -o is a suffix we already know about, but that still leaves us with this other suffix “-en” in there. That’s why we think that this “-en” suffix might be a way of turning verbs into nouns, like the “-ness” suffix in English! We see what appears to be this suffix in a few other places too, like “gosomen” from Grimm, “nasu kemena” from Divine, and “sokonena” from No Eyes.

This would be a really great discovery for translating things, if we manage to prove it. Making new words out of old words like this is called derivation, and Hallowspeak’s derivational morphology (remember, morphology means the ways you change words, like prefixes and suffixes) has been really lacking. Something as versatile as changing a verb into a noun would be so useful for translating people’s requests: it would basically just give us a whole bunch of extra words for free!! 

For example, we’d be able to make new words like “naden” meaning “arrival” out of the word “nada” which we already know means “arrive”. We could make the word “akalen” meaning “a hope” or “a wish”, from the word “akala” which is the verb meaning “to hope” or “to wish”. It really opens up the possibilities!!

There’s a few more bits and pieces of analysis that this discovery would give us, that we looked at in the Hallowspeak Live show on the 11th of February. Seeing how a lot of these words with the -en suffix also have the -a suffix showing plural, it’d seem like Hallowspeak doesn’t treat abstract nouns as mass nouns. In English, nouns like “violence” or “happiness” are abstract concepts, and so they’re treated as mass nouns, which have no singular or plural. Think about how it wouldn’t make any sense to say “violences” or “happpinesses”. Not all languages do it like this though, and if Hallowspeak actually does say “violences” and “happinesses”, it would be a nice thing to know.

Also, when adding the suffix -en, the -o at the end of  “nego” is removed. This might just be because the vowel of the suffix always replaces any vowel at the end of the root, just like the verb endings do. (A word like “hega”, meaning “to prepare”, with the suffix -ek, would become “hegek”, meaning they prepare). But we noticed that in the line “gel nego bezo”, the first word has no known suffixes, and the other two words both end with an o. This made us think that they’re actually all verbs (no suffix is how you conjugate a verb for “I”), and that the -o suffixes are infinitives or something similar, that allow the three verbs to chain together like that. An English equivalent for this would be the “to”s in something like “I have to try to go”. That’d also be a nice mini-discovery allowing us to make more complex sentences in Hallowspeak.

Just before I continue talking about the Hallowspeak Live show, I’d like to remind everyone that we’re still looking for discussion on how we should get the recordings of the streams to you all!! We’ve already had a few ideas – like putting the recordings on the website or making a Hallowspeak Youtube channel – but there’s still no real consensus on what we should do. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the public Hallowspeak channel!

Now, going chronologically through the livestream, our analysis was followed by a brief, 15 minute interlude of Koguri rambling about ukagakas, after which we went back to analysing Hornet’s “kala negosa tros” line, which we started in the previous stream. 

It turns out, there is a lot more wrong with this line that we need to figure out.

We thought everything was all well and good after the last Hallowspeak Live, where we realised that the reason this line seems to be missing the suffix -k at the end of “kala”, is because the k is skipped over if the next word starts with an ‘n’, to make it smoother to say. It seemed like a solved case, until we realised… That -sa suffix on “negosa” is an intransitive verb ending. If the verb here is meant to be intransitive, then there shouldn’t have been a -k suffix in the first place: the -k suffix is for the accusative case, the object of a transitive verb, and it should have been the intransitive suffix -n. 

But the bigger problem here is, an intransitive sentence only has one core argument. But here, there are clearly two!! This is like saying “I sleep you” in English! “Sleep” is an intransitive verb: it can only have one participant! It seems appropriate here to break out the longtime Hallowspeak Project motto: 

What is going on?????????

There were a variety of theories, ranging from some strange syntactic shenanigans of making the extra participant more of a cause for the action; to just assuming that we made a mistake with the -sa suffix and it isn’t actually an intransitive suffix. We spent a good amount of time going in depth on both these theories and a few others, but overall, there was a lot of just blank, silent staring at the one sentence “kala negosa tros”, trying to understand what it could mean. Every question we tried to answer ended up springing two more on us!

Along the way, we had a small little breakthrough with the meaning of “nego”ː If it meant “kill” or “die”, rather than specifically “violence”, it would fit Hornet’s use of it (talking about sacrifices and the “grave in ash”, as well as her needle being “lethal”); Moss Prophet’s use (talking about the infection killing people); and Tiso’s use (saying he wants killing, not peace). This felt so awesome to figure out, but it didn’t bring us any closer to understanding the grammar of “kala negosa tros”. It would be pretty funny if Hornet was telling us to kill god the first time we met her, though.

The confusion continued all the way until the very end of the livestream. By disproving the -sa suffix, it removed one of the things that was narrowing down the meaning of “kala negosa tros”, and so there were then so many more possibilities of what it could be. We were also forced further into figuring out how Hallowspeak handles its strange austronesian alignment system. (See Update 23 for an explanation of that). In fact, while we started on our analysis of “kala negosa tros” to avoid having to figure out the -n suffix, we actually started working out the -n suffix to avoid figuring out the austronesian alignment!!! :p

Unfortunately for us, the topic of different alignment systems is so confusing it sent us into a spiralling daze, falling through random Wikipedia articles and desperately trying to make sense of it all. Staring incessantly at terms like “antipassive”, and “applicative”, the stream basically became us running about, failing to understand term after term, slapping random theories about, even eventually cursing certain linguistic concepts for their very existence!…

…and just absolutely losing our minds.

It was like there was a single pin holding together all the theories about the “kala negosa tros” line, and we yanked it out, and everything crumbled around us. To put it another way:

The stream ended with a spreadsheet full of haphazard ideas, two completely mentally drained linguists, and pretty much no definitive progress. Yeah, it definitely wasn’t great (though I’ll admit it was pretty hilarious), but this won’t discourage us. Taking a hammer to our old theories and smashing them to bits isn’t always fun, but if we never did it, we’d just be tied down by things that don’t fit, and we wouldn’t be able to make any progress.

Despite all that, there is one event that definitely takes the prize for the biggest event that happened since the last update. And it isn’t for good reason – this is the most devastating event in the history of the Hallowspeak Project.

Soon after the last Hallowspeak stream, about half an hour, Crowan noticed that for some reason, he had been kicked from the Hallowspeak server. After that, more and more Hallowspeak members reported the same thing. Keep in mind that this is the private Hallowspeak Team server where all the analysis work happens. When the server owner, mish (me) went to investigate, it appeared that even I – the creator and owner of the server – had somehow been removed from it. 

The Hallowspeak server was nowhere to be seen.

Panicking, everyone scrambled to try and find an explanation for the mysterious mass removal, and hopefully get all of our conversations back. Trudging through old dms to find an invite link to the server yielded no results: all links we could find turned out invalid. We tried to click on message links to messages in the server, but it just kept saying we didn’t have access.

Now, over a month later, still no explanations have turned up. We don’t even know whether the Hallowspeak server still exists. Contacting discord support proved impossible since none of the options really fit our problem. The mystery has yet to be solved, and honestly? We’ve stopped trying to solve it.

This is what made this update take so long to finish. After losing all our records of our conversations, I’ve had to rely on short notes left in our documents, things copied and pasted into the public channel, and snippets of text read aloud during streams to tell this story. 

Instead, we’ve had to try and rebuild the Hallowspeak server anew. Thankfully, our progress is safe, since we had a lot stored on Google Drive. But all our discussions of new potential theories have been lost to the sands of the digital desert. We often find we need to look back on previous discussions to see where ideas came from, but now, that will be almost impossible.

On a more personal note, the over two year journey we’ve been on to build Hallowspeak up to where it stands today, was all erased in an instant. Every off topic conversation we ever had, talking about ourselves or joking around and having fun together; all of that has disappeared, along with everything else. 

This was without a doubt, the worst catastrophe that this Project has seen. Right now, we’re still working on getting the new, replacement Hallowpeak server running, back the way it was. Progress will be slow going forward, but we will continue to work hard for this Project like we always have.

To end, I leave you with this fantastic piece of artwork by Crow, made a few days after the tragedy.

(Note: Yes, I know this update would have been posted on April Fools in some timezones, but nothing in this was a prank. The server disappearance especially did actually happen.)