Author: friendly ghost

Hiya! I’m sure before you read any more of this update, the first item of news should be obvious: the Hallowspeak Updates aren’t really going to have a consistent schedule anymore.

The Team Members’ schedules aren’t always going to have time for Hallowspeak, and we’re just a group of friends, not an actual big professional company or something. So, we don’t always actually work on Hallowspeak every week. A lot of the previous updates have just been “haha yeah we didn’t do anything”, and then sometimes a bit of filler. And I didn’t really think that made for very good updates.

(Note: many of these updates were not copied onto the website)

So, from now on, updates will only really go up when we think we actually have something interesting to share.

Now, the news! If you can even remember, last update we saw the budding of a new theory, relating to the “-n” suffix! We showed there how “-n” has to be a case suffix, and couldn’t be anything else!

Then, we hit a problem. Take the line “nadino sonina”. “-ino” is a verb ending, and using Hallowspeak’s OVS word order, that would make “sonina” the subject. But, the subject takes the nominative, and we know the nominative case is the default and just has no case suffix. So… why does the subject here have this “-n” case???

Initially, we thought we made a breakthrough, thinking this was an example of quirky subject (yes that is the technical term). Quirky subject is exactly this! The subject of a sentence taking a case beside the nominative that it should take, usually due to some quality of the verb. So! We thought this was it! This explains it!

But then, we looked just a little closer and found…

…”-n” might not be a case at all.

Let’s go over it. Looking a little closer at some of the places we see “-n” we noticed an inconsistency with the theory that it’s a case suffix. For example, in “okoman ja?” from Sly, yeah, we see “-m” which can only be on nouns, but the “-n” is after the definiteness suffix “-m”. Same thing in “akoman” from Ogrim.

The problem is, the cases as we understand them come before the definiteness. So why are they after here?? The only thing that we know to be after the definiteness is the plural suffix “-a”, but we see the “-n” before the “-a” in loads of places! It looks like the “-n” goes between the definiteness and the grammatical number. But no type of noun suffix we found so far goes there!

So.. is this a new category of noun suffix??? Is it something that isn’t a case, a definiteness, or a grammatical number?

Keep in mind, it’s totally natural for some cases to come in a different place than other cases, so “-n” still could be a case. It’d just be the first time we’ve seen something like this happen, and we already have four cases!

So yeah. We have a lot more information, ideas, and deep analysis to piece together now; but we’re back to being completely confused by this mysterious “-n” suffix!

We have done a little more analysis of something pretty unique that we haven’t talked about before here, but I’ll save that for the next update once it’s more developed! ^-^

Now for the website! We know a lot of you aren’t into linguistics, or don’t know as much about it as us. So these updates with all their technical terms – as much as I try to explain them – can be difficult to understand!

That’s why, for the website, we’re working to implement a feature where you can hover your mouse over any technical term, and have it explained! We don’t know exactly how this will look, but we’re super excited to work on it and make The Hallowspeak Project more accessible!

But of course, we need to know which words need explanations! That’s why, it’d be super helpful if you guys could tell us which words from these updates you don’t understand, so we can write explanations for them all!

That’s all for today folks! Tune in next time!!!

Alrighty so… I am aware how long it’s been since the last actual update. But our general lack of progress recently, combined with the holiday coming to an end, has really dried up what we can talk about in the updates.

However! Now we actually do have stuff to talk about! As well as all the stuff from the previous updates that alone were too little to talk about! So, as usual, let’s get right into it with the Project news.

First off, Hallowspeak Live! That’s right, the first ever Hallowspeak Live show was hosted here on The Shellwood Ordeal discord server, on the 4th of April! It was an absolute blast, and it was fantastic being able to share the live Hallowspeak process with you all, and being able to chat with you! Due to some not great planning (that’s all on me), the show was kinda late, and the announcement of it starting didn’t leave much time for people to see it and get ready. I’m super sorry if you missed the show because of that. But don’t worry, we’re definitely doing it again sometime, and I cannot wait!

Now for a little bit of a new theory in Hallowspeak… So you may recall that we had to look through every single voice line in game in order to verify the austronesian alignment theory. But, while we were looking through the lines, we began to notice a strange suffix that kept making our job confusing. “Omis kadina”…? How can we tell what those words are, so we can check the word order? But we kept seeing stuff exactly like this! “Nadino sonina”, “okoman”… hehe, looks like we have a new suffix on our hands!!!

So, during the Hallowspeak Live show, we set about finding every instance of this “n” suffix so we could analyse them together. This is what we found:

• belo ba nakoden
• (m)exemno (es) kucin
• okoman ja?
• omis kadina
• das (bas) manuran
• nadino sonina
• sarena
• akoman
• citarin
• no eyes (multiple lines)

Soooooooo… what did we figure out with this? Well just take a look at that first one. “Belo ba nakoden”. Do you remember what “ba” means? It means “my”, meaning whatever comes after it has to be a noun. Alright, we learnt how to do stuff like that in the austronesian alignment update, so what? Well, if nakoden is a noun, then that means that “n” suffix has to be a noun suffix: either a different grammatical number (singular plural), or a different case!

Look more! That “n” appears as “na” super often, right! Well, the “a” is the plural, so we also know that the “n” can’t be a new grammatical number, since there already is one on there! For “akoman”, we actually already see a completely unmarked “ako” in some lines, mostly from Ogrim, so if this is a noun, then it must be “ako-m-n” under the surface, with the definite “m” meaning “the”!

So we’ve narrowed it down now: the “n” has to be a case! The cases we have so far are nominative, accusative, dative, and vocative. I really hope that “n” is a genitive, because we really need one! But unfortunately, that’s all we’ve figured out so far. Going forward, we might want to look at that “mexemno” line, since we see both “mexemno kucin”, and “mexemno es kucin”. There might be something there..

Now you may recall that we’ve been toying with the idea of a Hallowspeak logo for some time now, and even asking you guys for some ideas! Well we got even more ideas from Crowan, about a Hallowspeak mascot!!! Check it out!!!

Super awesome!

Alright, now for the Team news!! Apart from our usual shenanigans – this week it was discussing She Ra in #project-management ?- we have two super amazing things, and they’re both today!!!

Firstly, it’s the end of Crow’s semester!! I don’t really know what a semester is but I’m assuming it’s just like a term but in college, so yea!! Epic!! I can’t wait for more of that incredible Crowan insight! The Project is gonna be rocketing! :p

Secondly, and this is the big important announcement I was talking about….

It’s mine and Ivy’s one year anniversary!!!!!!!!!!!! ????? A Hallowspeak update proooobably isn’t the best place to get all mushy and lovey (and gay), so all I’m gonna say is I love u ivy c: and i’m like almost gonna melt from how happy i am with you ?

Aw darn, I got all mushy and lovey (and gay) anyways!

Alrighty folks, that’s the update!!! Tune in next time!

Alright folks! We’ve got some Project news and Team news today, so stick around until the end! As usual, we’ll start off with the Project news!

We’ve finally gotten around to that verification thing for the austronesian alignment theory! You may recall that since austronesian alignment is a whole word ordering rule, it has to apply to every sentence in Hallowspeak. Which means, to verify it, we have to check every single voice line in the game!!! God damn!!

Lemme run you through how we do this on a few example voice lines. First, a super easy one: Quirrel’s “namino bis”. We know that “namino” is a verb, since it has the second person plural verb ending. We also know that “bis” is an adverb, meaning “very”. So this sentence doesn’t even have an object, so we don’t even need to worry about the austronesian alignment rules! This sentence fits!

Now a much harder one. “Manema tocuro namyn”, also from Quirrel. If you remember, we’d figured out that the “curo nam” grammatical construction is a passive, to go along with the austronesian alignment. (See Update 23 if you have no idea what in fuck I’m talking about). We can tell from the verb inflection here (“yn” at the end of namyn” and “to” before “curo”) that the thing being ‘added back’ is “you”.

We know that the subject is “manema”, because it’s a noun, and it doesn’t have the accusative (object marker). If a noun isn’t shown to be the object using the accusative suffix, the default is that it’s the subject! “Manema” means “the fortune”, which is inanimate, and the other argument is “you”, which is animate. However, an inanimate subject and an animate object isn’t allowed with austronesian alignment, so, as we’ve seen, the passive is used! This one fits perfectly!

Now for one where not everything is already there for us: “belo ba nakoden”, from Quirrel. We don’t know the meanings of “belo” or “nakoden”, and they don’t end in any suffixes that we know either! But we can still figure out if this one fits. How? Well that small word “ba” means “my”, and anything that comes after “my” has to be a noun, right? Like you can’t say “my eat” or “my big” – those aren’t nouns!

As for “belo”, let’s just consider the possibilities for what it could be. If “belo” is a noun or adjective, then “belo ba nakoden” is just a noun phrase. There would be no verb, no action taking place, so the austronesian alignment rule isn’t needed! If “belo” is a verb, then that sentence would only have a subject, no object! The object goes before the verb in Hallowspeak (example: “I see dogs” in Hallowspeak = “dogs see I”), and since there’s nothing before “belo”, there’s no object, so the austronesian alignment rules also aren’t needed! So even though we don’t know what those words even are, all the possibilities fit the austronesian alignment theory!!

But, what about a sentence like “hakana segamys” from Hornet. We don’t know any of the words here. We have no clues at all, and so there’s no way we could figure anything out! So in cases like this, where it’s not just very hard, but impossible to figure out; we’ve decided to say that it fits. Just because, if everything that we can analyse fits a theory, then why would the stuff we can’t figure out yet not fit?

So with these methods, we’ve checked all the voice lines from Quirrel, Hornet, Zote, Elderbug, Cornifer, Sly, the Old Stag, Snail Shaman, Millibelle, and Cloth! And? Well, they all fit the theory!!!! With such success, I’m not even sure if we should check all the rest of the lines: maybe just a few random weird ones just to make sure? But honestly, it is looking like the austronesian alignment theory is definitely correct!!!!

Next up on the agenda, the logos! Two weeks ago, we asked all of you to give us ideas for a Hallowspeak logo!! And well,,, okay nobody gave any ideas for some reason.. However, despite our loyal viewers’ apparent lack of brains, we do have some initial ideas courtesy of Hallowspeak Team Member Crowan! Check em out!

These look awesome, and they’re only our first initial ideas! Still, we urge all of you guys to give us ideas: drawings or just little elements you think would look good in a logo!! I can’t wait to see what we come up with!!

Switching gears to the Team news: the person who messaged us about the possibility of making Hallowspeak keyboards has joined the Hallowspeak Server! Let’s all welcome Rosie to the Hallowspeak family!!! They say that they still haven’t received confirmation from Team Cherry about licensing stuff, which is a funny word that I don’t know the meaning of, but apparently it means they’re still not sure if this is actually going to become a product you can buy.

As well as this, anyone who’s requested any names written in Hallowscript will know that the new version of Hallowscript is far from complete. The old version of the alphabet from the old reddit posts is severely outdated, and so much about The Hallowspeak Project has changed since then. The new version, on the other hand, only has 3 letters so far.

In any case, we are really happy to be working with Rosie on this super exciting project! We’re super interested in seeing how this is gonna turn out, and how we’re going to create a keyboard in Hallowspeak! This has even revitalised the Hallowscript deciphering efforts, with the addition of a #neography channel to the Hallowspeak server! All we need now is a fun and witty name for this new project…. how do you combine “neography” and “entomology”?

And of course, finally, the joke news!!! Following on from the horrible, awful, distressing, and simply terrible information that was brought to my attention in Hallowspeak Update 25, the Hallowspeak server has seen the addition of a #speak-hallow channel, to get the other Hallowspeak Team Members to actually learn Hallowspeak!

And, of course, who could forget the huge, heated argument that happened here in #hallowspeak-development on Tuesday! For those who weren’t there, things got real angry and insults were thrown as we ravenously argued about if French or Spanish is better! Somehow, I was the sole member of Team French, and all those other Spanish idiots were against me!!! Why did so many Spanish people suddenly start flooding this channel anyway??? Was this planned???? Are all the Spanish people coming to beat my ass?? What’s going on??? THERE ARE SO MANY SPANISH PEOPLE HERE!!!!!!

This argument even escalated further spilling into the Hallowspeak server! I created the #spanish-speaker-jail channel, but before I could even give the context to the Members who aren’t in this server, basically the entire rest of the Team was against me!! They were all arguing that Spanish is better, and renamed the channel to #french-speaker-jail!! I can’t believe all the other Hallowspeak Members are dumb idiots!! Eventually though, Mops helped us to reach a compromise, and settled on the name #romance-language-speaker-jail. At least we had some sort of agreement ?. I’m still firing them all, though.

Aaaaaaaaaand that’s the end of this update! I hope you enjoyed this much more productive week, and of course all our shenanigans too!! :p Tune in next time, folks!!

Alrighty fellas! Today we have a super exciting development, so I’m just gonna get straight into it! You’ll never believe it! Only two weeks after we proved the causative theory (check update 21), we have another huge grammatical feature proven!! Yeah, you heard that right! (or read it, i guess). It seems like the big boost in Team morale that we saw last week really did pay off!!

So without further ado, here’s the issue: We have been struggling with two very difficult problems for months now: the issue of noun morphology, and the infamous “curo namyn”. Since this time we have actually solved these problems, I’m gonna take some time to briefly explain both of them first.

The noun morphology problem: We currently have three suffixes that can stack on nouns. The accusative suffix “-k” which marks that the noun is the object of the sentence; the definite suffix “-m” which means “the”; and the plural suffix “-a”. These should be able to stack in any combination. A noun being the object doesn’t stop it from being plural; it having a “the” doesn’t stop it from being an object; and the same for every other combination. The problem? Some of these combinations break the phonotactic rules of Hallowspeak, meaning the rules of which sounds can go where. For example the k suffix + the m suffix would be “km”, but how do you pronounce that? The first thing we did was look to the voice lines to see how Hallowspeak solves these issues. However, some combinations of these suffixes don’t show up anywhere in the voice lines at all! Why?!

Then, the so called “infamous” curo namyn problem: This little phrase, “curo namyn” appears once in Quirrels lines, and all over in Zote’s monologue (the voice line used for when he’s in Dirtmouth). Alright then, so it’s just a common, simple phrase that’s used a lot, right? Well, nope! “Curo namyn” means…. “to be have yourself”…… WHAT?

So those are the two huge problems that Hallowspeak has been facing, for nearly 4 months. Yeah. But as I said, this week we think we’ve actually solved both of these enormous, longstanding questions! Let’s start at the beginning, and look at the noun morphology. This is what it should look like in the accusative, which is where the phonotactic problems are.

	SG	PL
INDF	k	ka
DEF	km	kma

Now, looking through the voice lines, the only one that doesn’t appear anywhere is “km”. But wait.. Do you remember two updates ago, when the causative theory was proven? It showed that the “accusative” suffix could also be used for something being the causer of something else! And, when you look at all the appearances of “kma”, they’re all actually the causative…

Does this mean that the definite + accusative just doesn’t appear anywhere? If you remember from waaayyy back, we said that only animate nouns can take the definite suffix, and for inanimate nouns the definiteness is ambiguous. (This was because the m suffix is less common than we’d expect, and also because it shows up in the animate verb endings).

That means that… the suffix that can only go on animate nouns can’t combine with the accusative suffix.

So.. most likely, animate nouns just can’t take the accusative suffix. Which means animate nouns can’t be objects?

Hehe, those who have been following these updates will know where this is going. That’s right folks!! The austronesian alignment theory is officially proven!!!!! Austronesian alignment is when the subject must always be more animate than the object. In a language like Hallowspeak with only two levels of animacy – animate and inanimate – this means that animate nouns can’t be the object of a sentence, so the accusative is never needed for them. That’s why we never see the accusative definite combinations; because that would be against the austronesian alignment rules!

For example, a sentence like “The man sees the tree” would be following the rules, since the subject (the man) is animate, and the object (the tree) is inanimate. However the sentence “The rock hits the man” would be breaking the rules, since the subject (the rock) is inanimate, and the object (the man) is animate!!!

But of course, languages that have austronesian alignment still need some way to say “the rock hits the man”! So how do they do it, if it breaks the rules? Well, they can use some voicing tricks such as a passive to swap the roles around! Lemme show you! Using the passive, the sentence “the rock hits the man” becomes “the man is hit”, and then we can add the rock back using a preposition, making “the man is hit by the rock”. See, fixed!

Although now.. this creates another question… How do you say the passive in Hallowspeak?? Well, since I started this update by telling you about the long-standing “curo namyn” problem, I’m sure you can guess what our solution is :p but let’s go through this step by step. A passive is a valency changing operation, like the causative from two updates ago; except instead of adding another argument to the verb, the passive removes one. That’s why we had to add the rocks back to the sentence with a preposition: the passive made the verb intransitive, so it could only take one argument (the man)!

Now, here’s the big realisation: that “yn” at the end of “namyn” is an verb ending specifically for intransitive verbs! The passive in an intransitive verb! And the reason it’s quite common, is because it’s needed to say certain types of sentences due to the austronesian alignment! Think about it! The “curo namyn” never actually shows up like that – the curo is always inflected, either “becuro namyn” or “tocuro namyn”. Why would these two verbs be marked differently? Well, maybe one refers to the new subject, and the other refers to the old subject that’s being added back!!

This looks to be a good, solid solution to the “curo namyn” problem that we’ve been dealing with for months, that even goes with the other grammatical features that we’ve discovered. Keep in mind that this problem is just solved now, but not actually proven. To prove it, we’ll have to check all the places that it appears in the voice lines to see if it fits. However this solution seems so perfect, I’m pretty sure that by next week, it’ll be proven!!!

Alrighty guys, now for the Team update! Now, you guys won’t believe this! There’s been a huge crazy development in the Hallowspeak Team lore! I’d say it’s some crazy tea, but nobody says tea! Get ready for this guys, haha! Guess what! Last Tuesday, Hallowspeak Member Chroma plainly admitted to being a tsundere!

Here, we have the direct quote from the tsunie himself!

Incredible! Amazing! Hah!!! What an exciting story in the Hallowspeak Team! Such an unexpected development!! Folks, you heard it here first! But that’s now where this story ends! Upon this huge big reveal from Chroma, Member friendly ghost (that’s me c:) responded by adding a new emote to the Hallowspeak server. Check this out!

The Tsunie Emote!!!!!!

Hehe, okay that was silly. Thanks for reading this week’s update, and I hope you enjoyed this method of showing our discoveries! Tune in next time!!!!

Sorry for the delay on this one, but it’s actually for a good reason! The day that the update was meant to be written, we were having a super spicy discussion in the Hallowspeak Server, and I wanted to include it in the update! That’s right, we actually made progress!!! So let’s get right into it!

First, we’ll start with some Team news!! I’m sure you’ll remember our immense longing for one of our greatest members, DB, to return to the Project. Well I’m sure ya guessed it: he’s back!! While he’s still super busy with college stuff, he’s returned to the Project, which we are all absolutely ecstatic about!!! Welcome back DB, and holy shit we needed you.

For those who don’t know, DB was the very first member to join the Team, and has been extremely smart and valuable ever since! Without him, we often went whole weeks without any progress, but now his return has given us a huge boost of motivation!

Now for the Project news! Recall the issue of the “nada bis kalak” Godseeker line from last week’s update. The problem with this line is that the word order is really different than we’d expect. Usually, the object of the sentence comes first in Hallowspeak, since it has OVS word order. But here, the object “kalak” is coming at the end of the sentence! (We know it’s the object because it has the accusative case marker “-k”).

However, there was one key observation that blew this mystery open. Do you know what “nada” means? It means “come”. But wait… how does the word “come” take an object? How could something like “I come you” make any sense? The word “come” cannot take an object at all!! This type of verb, that can only take one argument, is called an intransitive verb. So now the issue has become: why the heck is there an object in this sentence???

Well, there are ways you can change the amount of arguments a verb can take (known as the verb’s valency) which are called valency changing operations, or voices. And the thing is, that strange sounding object of an intransitive verb thing, is actually a way that some languages do a valency increasing operation known as the causative. The causative is pretty self-explanatory: it adds an extra argument to the verb where the cause-er of the action goes. And this “nada bis kalak” sentence is a crystal clear example of this method of showing a causative!

This causative solution solves both of the issues we’ve had with this sentence. It solves the issue of why an intransitive verb takes an extra argument, but also the issue of why something that looks like an object is at the end of a sentence! That “kalak” is an extra piece of information being added to the sentence, not an actual object, so it just gets added on to the end!

But how about the meaning of the sentence? Does that make sense with this causative idea? Yep! Using the causative, the sentence translates as “Gods made me come”, which makes complete sense for Godseeker to say!!

However, there are also some other examples of something that looks like an object appearing in places it isn’t meant to be. Specifically, Quirrel, Moss Prophet, and Millibelle all say the word “kalakma” on its own in a voice line. This is pretty strange since if it’s just alone in its own utterance, then wouldn’t it be the default “kalama”? The “k” is only there for when a verb is being done to it!!!

Well, we now know that the causer of an action also takes that “k” bit, from “nada bis kalak”. This isn’t all that far fetched, since it’s actually quite rare for cases (things that show how a noun relates to the verb) to only fulfil a surface level role. Sure, an accusative like “k” might be defined as being for when the verb is being done to the noun, but it could also have the role of showing when the noun is causing the verb! Having extra meanings like this is actually more realistic for cases!

So that means, these separate “kalakma” lines are characters saying “by the gods”! What this means exactly is still up for interpretation. For some, it might look like an expression of surprise like “oh my god”. To me, it reminds me of the “inshallah” phrase in Arabic meaning “if god is willing”, which is said after making a promise. Whatever the meaning, the causative idea can explain these lines too!!

So, the causative idea makes linguistic sense, and also makes sense everywhere it’s used! I’m calling this one…. proven!!!!!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s update! Tune in next time!

Only a few small little bits of news this week, but it’s more than nothing! We’ll start off with the Project news

Firstly, a new question for us to figure out: The voice line from godseeker “nada bis kalak” poses a bit of an incongruency with our current understanding of the language, since for some reason its object “kalak” seems to come last in the sentence! We’re not sure why this is, since until now we’ve been firmly sure that Hallowspeak’s word order is object initial (like yoda talk). There’s just a few seeds of ideas currently for how to solve this. Of course maybe it’s just Godseeker, a non Hallowspeak native, messing up the grammar. However another possibility is that this difference in word order is actually a feature of Hallowspeak.

As you know, Hallowspeak has both verb agreement, and noun case, so the roles in the sentence are strongly and clearly marked. And in languages with such clear and obvious role marking (showing who does what in the sentence), word order often gets freed up to do other things! If the verb shows who’s doing it, and there’s a suffix on nouns showing if they’re the object, then you don’t actually need the word order to show who’s doing what!

The most common use for this freed up word order is to show focus. Placing a certain thing in a certain position is used to place emphasis on that thing. This is most commonly how languages with free word order work. There’s also another way: where shuffling around the word order actually conveys different grammatical meanings, like how swapping the subject and the verb in english makes something a question (You are tall -> Are you tall?).

Now for the Team news! After a particularly passive-aggressive, but still motivational speech by yours truly, the linguistics channel on the Hallowspeak server has actually been used!! That’s right, people are actually trying to work on Hallowspeak again! Incredible! Will the Team just return to their laziness again, or does this occasion mark the start of a great revitalisation? Only time will tell!!

And the last item of news for today. There are considerations into possibly having a schedule or rota for doing the Weekly Hallowspeak Updates. Do you know what that means? It means I possibly won’t have to do this update thing myself every week!! Fuck yeah!

Well that’s it for this week, folks! Tune in next time!!