Author: friendly ghost

Unfortunately, there’s been no huge big breakthrough this week, however I do have a small possible connection between two of our biggest questions!

Last week, we went over the big question of noun morphology in loads of detail. Then, I explained a possible solution to the problem, that being austronesian alignment. If you haven’t read last week’s update, I’d recommend you do so, so that you can understand this one. Now remember, that’s not Hallowspeak’s only big question! Another discovery that we’ve been thoroughly confused about was an incredibly bizarre couple of words: “curo name”.

Those two words “curo name”, appear one together in Quirrel’s lines as “tocuro namyn”, and multiple times in Zote’s big speech as “becuro namyn” and “curo namyn”. This sequence of words always stumps us when trying to decipher those lines. The reason? It means “to be have”. Uh… what?? Quirrel’s line’s one says “you are have yourself”, and Zote’s ones mean “I am have yourself” and “it is have yourself”. What the fuck does that mean?????

The first thing that everyone in the Hallowspeak Team thought was that this was some sort of grammatical construction. While many grammatical meanings are encoded as affixes (prefixes and suffixes and some other funny types), like -ed for past tense in English, other meanings are sometimes encoded as a grammatical construction, using multiple words. For example in English, saying that you “have done” something, seems a little weird. You “have walked”? How you do have walking? Walking isn’t an object, how do you have an action? That doesn’t make sense literally, but it’s just the grammatical construction for the English Perfect aspect. This type of grammatical construction using a helping verb is called an auxilliary.

Since the verb combination “is have yourself” is completely nonsensical, we thought that it could be an auxiliary like that. And now that we have the idea of austronesian alignment, we’re thinking that there could be a connection.

Let me explain: Just because austronesian alignment forbids certain orders of subjects and objects, doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to say those things! For example, a sentence like “The rock killed me” would go against the animacy hierarchy; an inanimate object doing something to something animate. So in order to say that, languages with austronesian alignment have to swap it around to make the animate thing the subject.

One of the most common ways to do that is using valency changing operations. The valency of a verb is how many arguments it can take. For example “He saw you” has two arguments: “he” and “you”, so it’s transitive. However “you were seen” can only have one argument: “you”, so it’s intransitive, and the “he” has to be added back in with the word “by”. As you can see, the valency of that verb was changed, and this specific type of valency changing operation is called a passive!

So in order to say the sentence “The rock killed me”, in a language with austronesian alignment, you’d say “I was killed by the rock”. Now, I don’t know if this is just me, but that weird “is have yourself” sorta seems like a possible passive construction! “Is” is a common auxiliary verb used for passive constructions, so could it be that?

This is honestly just completely speculation, but it would be really great if we could prove it! It would solve two of Hallowspeak’s big questions!

That’s all for this week! Tune in next time!!

Well, good news everyone! The Hallowspeak Team is getting back to work! Now that my mock exams are over, and Christmas break is almost here, you can expect some more exciting updates soon!

The current big challenge that we’re working on is the ever-confusing noun morphology. Here’s a recap for those who don’t remember: What we’ve had for a while now is a suffix “-k” marking the accusative case, meaning it shows that the main verb is being done to the noun. We’ve also had a “-ma” suffix showing definiteness, equivalent to the English word “the”. There had been speculations about that “-ma” suffix actually being two suffixes following eachother: “-m” for definiteness and “-a” for plurality. However this then launched the question of how those two suffixes interact with the “-k” accusative suffix.

Well now, we have proven and solidified the theory that the “-ma” suffix is in fact “-m” and “-a”! This is because of the word “mea” which appears Snail Shaman’s voice lines. The vowel sequence “ea” doesn’t appear anywhere else in the voice lines, which means there’s no way that “mea” can be its own word. It has to be “me” + “a”.

However, now there is a little problem. How do we combine with the accusative? This is what would happen if we just left it as is:

-k	-ka
-km	-kma

See the problem? That “-km” combination isn’t pronounceable (in Hallowspeak). This is known as phonotactics; the rules about what sequences of sounds are allowed in a language. The “-k” suffix also has a problem, because it would cause two consonants together if the noun already ended with a consonant. The ways that languages solve issues like this are known as their phonotactic repair strategies, and that’s what were currently trying to figure out. It’s super difficult because mysteriously, some of those combinations never even appear in the voice lines, even though they’re possible, so we just have to guess what would happen to them.

One common repair strategy in many languages is the use of an extra vowel inserted between the problematic consonant cluster to break it up, which is called epenthesis. Usually it’s quite a ‘neutral’ vowel, for example “a”. That would give us this:

-(a)k	-ka
-kam	-(a)kma

Unfortunately, “-ak” and “-kam” don’t appear anywhere within the voice lines, and there’s not really any place that we can see evidence of epenthetic vowels.

Now…. there is another idea.. but it is very speculative.

For quite a while now, we’ve believed that Hallowspeak has two levels of animacy, animate and inanimate. Animacy is a type of noun class, like grammatical gender, but usually a bit less random since it actually has to do with the noun itself, rather than just being “haha yes this object is feminine!!!”. We think this because of two reasons. First, for something as common as “the”, that “-m” suffix doesn’t actually come up all that much in the voice lines. That’s a bit weird, but some languages that have animacy just don’t mark inanimate nouns for definiteness! The second reason was that there’s mysteriously two forms of the third person verb endings: “ek” and “eku”; and “mek” and “meku”. That “m” is already pretty suspicious, since it’s the same as the “-m” suffix for “the”. Well we know that definiteness is linked to animacy, and it only appears in the third person verb endings. Obviously the first and second person (me and you) would be animate, so everything points to those verb endings being for inanimate nouns and animate nouns.

The thing is… some languages have another weird quirk with animacy. Way more often than not, an animate thing will be doing the verb, and an inanimate thing will be having the verb done to it. In other words, animate nouns are far more likely to come as the subject, and inanimate nouns are far more likely to come as the object. Because of that, some languages that have animacy don’t even allow sentences that are the other way around to exist! A sentence where an inanimate thing is doing something to an animate thing wouldn’t be possible, and you’d have to say it in some other way. This is called austronesian alignment.

If Hallowspeak has austronesian alignment, it would mean that the accusative “-k” suffix going with the definite “-m” suffix would be extremely rare. The “-m” suffix for definiteness can only appear animate nouns, and the only way an animate noun could also be in the accusative (meaning the verb is being done to it) is if both the subject and object are animate. That would explain why we never even see some of those combinations of suffixes.

Again, this theory is just starting out and is very speculative, but if it’s true it would explain why we have had so much trouble finding all the possible combinations of noun suffixes. Well just have to find out!!

That’s what I have for you guys today! Tune in next time!!

Not really much happened this week in terms of the project this week, so we’ll just go through the evidence that we have for some things. Specifically, I’ll give you all the evidence for the noun grammar which we talked about last update.

We currently have 11 nouns in our dictionary. These are the forms that we see them in:

Kala:

• kala
• kalakma
• kalala
• kalamado(s)
• kalakmado
• kalak
• kalao

Kere:

• kerektis

Kik:

• kika

Citari:

• citari
• citarin (maybe it’s actually citarim and we heard it wrong?)

Mane:

• manema

Me:

• me
• mea
• merma (?)
• mera (?)
• mele (?)
• mes (?)
• cemele (?)

Me is such a short word, it’s hard to tell whether something that has “me” in it is “me” with a prefix or suffix, or just its own word.

Goan:

• goan
• cegoan

Mini:

• minima

Tros:

• tros
• trosje

As you can see, some of those words only every show up with a suffix, and never plain on their own. This is still acceptable in our opinion, since if it makes sense for a suffix to be there, it can safely be assumed that it is a word with a suffix.

Another thing that we’ve decided to accept is the infamous “Logical, but not attested”. We have a very small sample of voice clips to analyse, so if we find a pattern that seems to hold, but we don’t see every possible instance of it, we’ll accept it. For example, if we see that many of the third person inanimate verb endings can be changed into animate by putting an m at the start, then we’ll apply that to all the third person endings that we have, even if we don’t see every single third person ending both plain and with the m. We simply do not have enough voice lines to insist on only confirming things when we see it in the voice lines.

We are still immensely confused about the noun morphology problem. There I’ve laid out all the noun morphology we can see. We have no idea what to do with it. Every night we gather around a crackling fire far within woods. Amidst the trees gazing down at us, we look upwards towards the sky; the endless void staring into us with pity. Sparks fly and dance about us as we join hands, slowly and solemnly, then with the same unbridled stillness chant towards the heavens our saviour’s name. “Db.” Where is he, to grace us with his wisdom: his unending knowledge unrivalled by us mere mortals; to grant unto us the mere gift of his presence; to look pitifully at our problems and make of them but a simple answer. Where is he, the lord of going back and changing outdated aspects of the project. The grand god of grammatical analysis; one who’s judgement falls harsh and piercing – striking through our confusion and impaling our hearts as we sit lost for words. Where is he. The one who we need most. “Where is he”, we bellow in chorus up towards the heavens above. The fire sputters and falters. The leaves around us rustle a soft lulling noise in the breeze. Gazing towards the sky, we stand in a circle awaiting an answer from our great db. He is no where to be found. The fire twists and tires before snuffing itself out. Is it too late? We did not appreciate his gifts in the past, claiming his skepticism as damaging. Is this but retribution for our disgratitude? We chant a final time, in vain hopelessness and harrowing fear. “O db, we beckon for thine aid; grace us, great God of Hallowspeak, please, with thy divine intelligence”

“Please db. We need you now.”

“Db, the greatest member of the Hallowspeak Team.”

“Save us.”

Alright everyone! A few things this week! This week was quite confusing for the Hallowspeak Project, with not just ongoing questions continuing to go unanswered, but also new questions too!

First off, we are still unsure of how the different bits of noun morphology interact with eachother. Just to remind you, we have cases, a plural suffix, and a definite suffix (equivalent to the word “the”), but we’re unable to find all the ways that those three suffixes go together. Do they just go one after another, or do certain combinations of things actually have their own unique suffix? The former is known as agglutination, and the latter is known as fusion. So far, Hallowspeak has appeared to be more on the agglutinative end of the spectrum, but if it is, then why can’t we find all the combinations? This is still unknown!

Now for the new question: After another boring beach trip ._. (seriously why does anyone enjoy the beach it’s boring as shit) a big discrepancy has been discovered in bits of Hallowspeak that were discovered ages ago! That being the set of suffixes “do/dos/mado/mados”. Previously, we thought that these suffixes were verb endings, and that’s not entirely wrong! The suffix “do” appears on things which are definitely verbs! However “mado” and “mados” are also found on one word, that being “kala” in Mask Maker’s dialogue. Back when we decided on these suffixes, we didn’t know what “kala” meant, so just assumed it was a verb. We saw the verb endings “ek/eku/mek/meku” and applied the same pattern to “mado” and “mados”. However we now know that “kala” is actually a noun, meaning god! So.. well, it can’t be a verb ending!

“Ma”, we’ve figured out, is the definite article, possibly followed by the plural. So then, is the “do” from the verbs not the same as the “do” from the nouns? What’s going on here?

Well, the reason we originally thought that “do” was a verb ending, starting this whole group of related suffixes, was because of “tostakugando”. We thought it means “hard to believe it”, since it’s so long and complicated for something that just seems to behave like “incredible” or “wow”. However, now we know that the first person singular verb ending is just nothing. So if we simply do something like “tosta kugan do”, that would work! The “tosta kugan” would translate to “It’s hard for me to believe”. But then… what is “do”? You might just say “that’s obvious, it means ‘it’!” The thing is, Hallowspeak is OVS, remember? If it really was “it”, it would have to be “tosta do kugan”! So what could it be???

Also don’t forgot about how it appears after nouns as well! “Kalamado” What does that mean? “The gods it”? What????? What???????????????

What is going on?!!!!!

….yeah. This is,, very confusing. Everyone in the Hallowspeak Team is very confused. All we can hope for now is for db (our best member, if you recall) to descend from the heavens and fix this issue. Db has a long history of wanting to change old bits of the Project, instead of working on new things. We always dismissed him, but now the one time that we need it, he’s gone! …..is this karma,,, We’ll just have to wait and see!

Welp, that’s all we have for this week’s update! Tune in next time!!

Alright everyone! A very exciting week for Hallowspeak this time, not only for the Project, but also for the Team!!

Firstly, the Project updates!! Following a very boring beach trip I had yesterday, a good few new ideas for the project have been brought to the table. (listen okay i don’t like swimming so i sat on a beach chair and analysed a language)

Now, following on from last week’s conundrum about how the newly discovered plural suffix interacts with the cases, we have a couple options! Since we’re having such a difficult time finding cases with and without the plural, perhaps Hallowspeak actually has inverse number? Inverse number is when instead of a suffix for the plural, every single word is either singular or plural by default, and the suffix is used to switch which one it is. Then, by definition, the regular version of a noun without a suffix would be much more common, because it would be the most common amount of it.

Another option might be a tiny bit of fusion. Until now, we’ve found that Hallowspeak is very agglutinative, meaning each little piece that you can attach to a word has just one meaning. However, fusion is when the prefixes and suffixes can encode multiple things at the same time. So maybe, the reason we can’t see the plural suffix in all those possible combinations is because certain combinations actually have their own unique suffix!!

Now just before we continue, the second person verb endings have changed to “ino” and “dino”, to “in” and “ino”. We noticed a mistake that we made here a while ago, so we just needed to correct that. It’ll help us later, too, just wait!

Next, some new words and verb endings added to Hallowspeak!

Citari:

This appears in Elderbug’s line “Wo, citari bakara” It’s pretty safe to assume that “Wo” is just an interjection that’s like “Oh”, or “Woah”, and Elderbug’s lines show that he’s pretty surprised to see a traveller here, so perhaps citari means traveller!

-caro:

“Mia” appears twice in Zote’s lines, once without a verb ending “jydo mia bis”, and once with a verb ending “miacaro”. The first verb without a verb ending is the first person “Me” (heh, fitting for Zote, always talking about himself). Now, notice how “miacaro” is the only word in that voice line, no object, which means this verb must be intransitive, which is like “He sleeps”, no object, just a subject. If Zote is still talking about himself, which cmon, he probably is, that makes “-caro” the first person intransitive verb ending!!

Tono:

Elderbug’s line “akala em tono” can be fully translated, except the word tono. It means “I want to __” Elderbug talks about not wanting to go down into the well like the other adventurers, and is content staying here, so “tono” could be “stay”!!

Me:

“Me” appears in both Quirrel’s “Se kja me cipyrin” and Snail Shaman’s “kweno nin mea”. Since we see it both plain and with the plural suffix “-a”, we know it’s a noun. We also know that “kweno” means “fearlessness”. Hallowspeak is currently thought to have OVS (object, verb, subject), so this sentence means “[noun] [verb] fearlessness”. What could that be? Well, we’ve been missing a very curo a word for ages now: “person”. (or bug, i guess). And just as luck would have it, the word “person” would fit here perfectly! Look at “nin”; that’s got our new corrected verb ending – I told ya it’d help us later! That “n” is a super short verb, so it’s probably a very common one, perhaps a modal? What about “need”? “People need fearlessness” – makes sense!!

Wait, but why would the verb “nin” have the second person “you” ending, if the subject is “people” – shouldn’t it be the third person plural “they”? Well instead of thinking we’ve made a mistake, I think we have a possible new grammatical construction!

As well as “kweno nin mea” from Snail Shaman, we also see this verb ending mistake in “kala negosa tros” from hornet, which should also have a third person ending! Neither of the verbs in those sentences, “nin” and “negosa”, have the correct verb ending! Let’s look at Snail Shaman’s line first. Keep in mind that if the subject is a pronoun, it’s not included because it’s already shown on the verb, so this can’t be explained by “mea” meaning “you” Well, perhaps it means “_ like you”, but literally means “__ you”. Let’s try that out! Snail Shaman’s line would translate to “People like you need fearlessness” That makes loads of sense!! Now let’s try it with Hornet’s line. It would be “Siblings like you __ god”. You’ll never believe this, but Hornet’s English line during this line talks about how she knows what kind of creature Ghost is, and knows what they want to do. This makes even more sense, and fits with the English line! Incredible!!

Also, this gives us another verb ending. If Hornet is talking about “you” as in every vessel, that would make it the second person plural “y’all”. Seeing as we already have a second person plural, but no second person plural intransitive, the “-sa” ending on “negosa” must be that verb ending!! We now only have one verb ending missing!!!!

Just one final test. “Se kja me cipyrin” can’t be translated, but we can tell the roles of the words in that sentence. It would be something like “[Adverb], [Adjective] person like you [Verb]”. Quirrel is describing Ghost, and also talks about other adventurers in similar situations, so even if we don’t know what it means, it makes sense!!

Now, for the Team Updates!! There have been two very exciting things this week in the Hallowspeak Team!

Firstly, it was my birthday on the 27th!!! I’m 15 years old now! I went to the mall with some friends and played a real piano for the first time, so that was super fun! However, that isn’t the most important item of news about the Hallowspeak Team Members this week!!!

Remember all the way back in Update 4, with the Femboy News? Our beloved member Nuhrii was revealed to be a femboy. However, that wasn’t.. entirely accurate. After @Bash (nuhrii’s other username) had a very busy and hectic hiatus from the project, they revealed to us a few days ago that they had discovered themself as being trans!! We all want to wish them a huge congratulations on figuring themself out, and hope they have tons of good luck in living their true life!

Thank you all for tuning in to this super long Hallowspeak Update! Tune in next time!!!

BREAKING NEWS!

That’s right everyone we’re coming in today with some fresh breaking news! This story only happened earlier today, and is still ongoing!

If you recall, we figured out that the plural suffix was adding an “-a”, which then launched the question: how does this interact with our other noun endings?

Well, in a sudden burst of research just earlier today, there has been a breakthrough! In the past, we have assumed that the “-ma” suffix appearing on many nouns was simply for definiteness, akin to the word “the” in English. However, a sudden realisation came to the linguistics channel on the Hallowspeak server earlier today: what if it was actually “-m”, plus that “-a” suffix?

As soon as this idea presented itself, we leapt to analyse the voice lines for evidence, to prove or disprove this theory. And sure enough, looking through the voice lines for words that we know the meanings of, this new explanation fits!! It makes complete sense given the voice lines!

However, this is not over yet! As I said, this research is still ongoing, as we speak!! The question is now, how does this work for the case endings? For those unaware, case endings are bits you add to nouns to know what role they play in the sentence, eg who’s doing what, and who it’s being done to.

Early research has already begun into this exciting new opening, however nothing yet conclusive has been found. The first attempt to create a theory for this yielded far too many results that were “logical, but not attested”, meaning they made sense given what we know, but were no where to be found in the voice lines. Truly mysterious! This is now a truly open question in Hallowspeak; incredibly eluding and intriguing!

That’s all for today’s update, folks! All of us here at the Hallowspeak News station are keen on the edge of our seats to see how this story develops! Tune in next time!