Here you’ll find all the Hallowspeak Updates copied over from The Shellwood Ordeal discord server. Some Updates from the server are not copied here, since they were just filler and didn’t have any actual news. Other updates here have had some of the Team news removed, since Team Members didn’t want their personal information on the website. However, all the important news about Hallowspeak is here.
Occasionally, an update may be copied over to the website a few weeks after it’s posted on the server. This is because we might want to get feedback on the server about the update to improve the explanations in it, before we put it on the website.
Wwwwwwwwwhats up Hallowspeaksters ?! It’s ya girl, ghost here, back for another EPIC Hallowspeak Upda
Okay yea I’ll stop I’m not sure what that was about really. Anyways hiiii !!! As always, let’s start with what’s new with us ! I graduated !!! And I’m in ENGLAND now ???? This country is very weird and sometimes I feel like everyone here is insane but I live here now ! So that’s pretty cool i guess :3
Oh also – just putting it here – we did a few little bugfixes around the website so the Meet The Team page should have all its images back to normal, and the hover-over linguistic term explanations should render correctly again.
Anyways ! We’ve decided to take a bit of a different strategy in deciding what we look into going forward. Chroma has been getting the dialogue lines from the game and trying to translate them into Hallowspeak using what we have. Obviously, pretty much all but the very simplest lines are fully translatable right now, but that’s the point ! Doing this exercise shows us what grammar bits we most need to find in order to make more complex sentences.
Of course it’s not that simple though : we can’t just decide we need a particular grammatical feature and pick something from the voice lines to fill that role. Moreso this is just to gather a list of things to look out for ; common grammatical structures – stuff needed for pretty much any sentence longer than four words – that we still haven’t found equivalents of in the voice lines yet.
In other words, things used so commonly, no matter the language, that we still somehow haven’t found evidence for!
What things are those exactly ? Well ! One: clause-chaining ! We pretty much have no idea how Hallowspeak puts multiple clauses in a single sentence. Some languages like to say things like “I ate a pizza and then went home.”, while other languages prefer to say “Having eaten a pizza, I went home.”, and some languages (like English) are fine with either. We still don’t know how Hallowspeak does it though ! And assuming the residents of Hallownest speak with a higher than first grade reading level, they definitely use some strategy to link clauses !
Second on the priority list, possessive constructions ! Different languages express possessive constructions in a wide variety of different ways. Is it “Bob’s book”, “The book of Bob”, “Bob his-book”, or something else ? Possessives are also sometimes used for more abstract ‘linking’ relationships rather than simple ownership – think “City of Tears” – so we really want to find out how they work !
About that second one, I think I might actually have a sneaking suspicion on what Hallowspeak’s strategy for it might be. If that theory ends up going anywhere… you guys may just get another update quite soon after this one…!
Oh also, that’s not the only extremely useful organisational work Chroma has done ! They’ve also gone and found the actual audio files for every voice line, so we don’t need to go onto Youtube to reference them, and they’ve put together a collection of every single one of our theories (not just the recent ones, I mean all the way back since the soft reset !) along with all the pieces of evidence we used to arrive at them. This means new theories have all the relevant information right there for us to analyse, and if ever we need to rethink a prior theory, it’ll be far easier since we’ll know exactly what led us to the conclusion we made.
Now, for a bit more of that Hallowspeak update drama and mystery you’ve all come to know and love…
Someone recently reached out to DB on reddit about making Hallowscript keycaps ; a super cool idea ! if not for the fact that Hallowscript isn’t a cipher, and so “Hallowscript keycaps” is a bit of a meaningless, nonsensical phrase, unless you’re also making a Hallowscript keyboard layout.
Initially, I was pretty hesitant to respond to this person and have them join the server. The existence of “Hallowscript keycaps” could imply that Hallowspeak is just a cipher, rather than the fully fledged language we’ve been working to create. And honestly, in my personal opinion, I think the conflation of conlangs and ciphers is the biggest poison to the conlanging community, understating the work it takes and trivialising the artform in the minds of non-conlangers. (That’s why you’ll see clarification about it repeated all over this website.) And with Hallowspeak having a much larger non-conlanger following than a lot of other conlanging projects, that wasn’t a risk I wanted to take.
Some of us wanted to accept their request and work with them to produce something out of this project, rather than the far more nebulous ‘progress’ that we’ve been making for the past… five years ?
Others of us insisted that they’d rather have the project produce ‘nothing’ for even more years to come, rather than play any part in serving to further the misleading misconceptions about our hobby and its community.
However, we discussed the idea that, if this person really wants to make a Hallowscript keyboard, then if we explained to them why “Hallowscript keycaps” wouldn’t be what they imagined, they might be determined enough to actually help us to achieve that goal, even after learning what would actually go in to doing it.
And so, DB reached back out to them and invited them to our server. They accepted the invite and joined, and we all welcomed them to the Project ! And then… no reply…? More than two weeks later, they still haven’t said a single word in the server…! Not even a response to us saying welcome… Nothing in any of the channels.
They’re like a ghost, which is perhaps fitting given as their profile picture is one. But really, this is… kinda really weird ? Honestly, I don’t even know if I want to ping them and say like “Hey dude! Are you there? What happened?”, because this whole thing just kinda weirds me out ! Did we scare them off…? Was the server too inactive and they decided the project was too slow for them ? Were we too gay and transgender for them to handle ??
Perhaps we’ll never know. This seems like it probably wont go anywhere anytime soon. But that isn’t the only odd occurance that’s happened recently…
It’s no secret that the Mysterious Server Deletion of ’22 is the biggest tragedy to ever happen to this project ; one that, honestly, we never fully recovered from. If the decreased speed of progress of this project can be attributed to anything – apart from like, us all growing up – then it’d have to the morale impact of that event.
However, what we didn’t realise… what we didn’t realise this entire time… was that somehow, a few of our members are just, not in the new server ! That’s right, a couple of our members just aren’t in the current Hallowspeak Dev server ! And these aren’t members who used to be super inactive either :
We just suddenly made the realisation that Soren, the person who basically made this entire website, is completely missing from the dev server ! And then, looking deeper, we realised it’s not only him, but Bash too, a member of the Council of Grammar !
Trying to figure out what had happened, we found Bash’s username and reached out after all this time. (And – unrelated – judging by their current user profile, it seems they go by she/her now.) Turns out we had sent her a link to the new server, but it seems like she never joined… I’ve asked her what happened, but as of this update being published, she hasn’t answered yet.
Even more confusingly though, is Soren ! We haven’t been able to reach back out and ask him what happened… Because none of us seem to even have his contact anymore ! He’s gone from all our friends lists, which is especially weird if he ended up deleting his account, since on discord, deleted accounts still show up as “Deleted User”, they don’t just disappear.
We… don’t really know exactly what to do about this ! We don’t have a plan in any case. While very surprising though, we aren’t too scared about it at this point. We’ll just have to see what comes of this, and see whether we can get them back.
Anyways, that was the Update for you all ! I hope you enjoyed, and see you next time !
Aaaalright, and thus concludes our Team Cherry impression ! Hope you all enjoyed a year of no news ! Wait, you guys didn’t know that’s what we were doing….? You thought we just didn’t do anything for basically a year…?
…Yeah, you’re right. Oops !
Anyway ! What’s new with us ? Well, Crowan’s doing college stuff, Mops moved out and got a new job, Koguri got diagnosed as “got that shrew in them” (ADHD), basically everyone has started baking bread for some reason, and I as you can see, have started putting spaces before my !s and ?s. Oh, and also, like, university applications. I got five uni offers, yippee !!
While I’m sure most of you do care a little about what’s going on in our lives (I’d hope, at least), I’m also sure what you’re really here for is.. well, a Hallowspeak update. So, I wont keep you waiting any longer !
Since last update, it’s mainly just been little tidbits here and there, ideas and theories being thrown around and discussed, but they’re still interesting.
We’ve had -do and -dos in our verb agreement table for a while now as intransitive verb endings for the 3rd person, which makes it kind of strange that Mask Maker’s lines have things like “Kalama-dos” and “Kalakma-do”. Kala is a noun, it means “god”, and kalama/kalakma are both forms of kala that we understand. The question then becomes, why are there verb endings directly following a noun ? Are these verb endings somehow suffixed onto a noun ? Or are they able to exist as standalone words too ? There’s a decent sized handful of voice lines that seem to have this “-do” thing, so we do have some material to work with when trying to figure this one out.
Chroma’s been working on writing out glosses (which are like a structural way to write out sentences for the purposes of analysing grammar) for some of the trickier seeming voice lines we’re looking at. As always, the terrible spectre of curo name is haunting us. It’s not an auxilliary construction, because sometimes both words are conjugated, and it’s not a split-headed agreement system because sometimes neither word agrees with anything else in the sentence !!! Waaaarghhh !!!!
Is it weird that so far the copula, the verb that means “to be” in Hallowspeak, only has three forms, whereas most other verbs have far more ? Usually it’s the other away around, think about how in English a verb like “to like” basically only has “like”, “likes”, “liked”, and “liking”; but “to be” has “am”, “is”, “are”, “was”, “were”, “being”, etc. Pretty much every language in the real world that has a copula is similar, yet in Hallowspeak it’s the other way around. Don’t get me wrong, it totally could be correct, but it still seems to us a little like we’re missing something…!
We’ve also been more abstractly discussing some more syntactic things, basically trying to figure out how to make sentences more complicated than “person – action – thing”. Stuff like content clauses (eg. “I know what you are.”) and verb chaining (eg. “I want to start thinking about going“). Before analysing the voice lines directly, we like to think about what we already know and come up with ideas for how something could work, so we kinda know what we’re looking for. Hallowspeak’s syntax has proven pretty unique already though (Remember how in Hallowspeak a sentence like “I saw her” is said more like “Her saw I”), so figuring out how more complex sentences could be said is tricky in its own right. The details are a bit too technical to talk about in an update without actually leading to any discovery yet, but if you want to hear about it you can ask me in the server !
Apart from that, there was a lot of squinting really hard at screenshots going “what is even going on in this line” that we started but still need to follow up on : stuff that didn’t really get far enough yet to include in this update.
However, and I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear this, it is pretty much unanimous across the whole Hallowspeak Team that we want to get back into working on Hallowspeak more. Of course, it’s not that simple, as evidenced by our one year plus Team Cherry impression (okay, joke’s getting old now), but do know that we’re still passionate about this project, and we will keep working on it, however fast or slow it ends up going.
Thank you to everyone who stuck with us, on the Discord server or elsewhere, during this whole time. We’re so glad to have people excited about our silly linguistics project. We’re still answering questions and having chats about the project on the server, so as always feel free to join there if you want to ask anything or talk about Hallowspeak !
Until hopefully less than a year from now, then. Thanks for tuning in !
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Oh also Koguri got a pet snake. Let’s… let’s hope it doesn’t eat them.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa to everyone!!!
Unfortunately, I still haven’t had the time to write up the enormous update that will be required to go through everything that’s happened since Update 40, but I do have a bit of time to give you all some Hallowspeak content for this festive season!!
There’s been some mention of Hallowspeak’s phonology, specifically phonotactics, in the Hallowspeak Development channel recently, so I thought I’d take that opportunity to give that some explanation! Don’t worry, you’ll see how this is festive soon!
So, the phonology of a language is everything concerning the language’s sounds: what sounds it has, where those sounds can go, how the sounds change depending on context, that sort of thing. Phonotactics is specifically that second one: no language just allows all sounds to come in any position in a word. Even though “ng” “a” “p” “t” “k” and “f” are all sounds in English, “ngaptkfp” could never be an English word, and most English speakers would probably have a pretty hard time saying it! That is because of phonotactics! English allows the “ng” sound only at the end of a syllable (“thing”, “rang”, “language”), but never at the beginning of a syllable (the bane of anyone named Nguyen :p). On top of that, the cluster “ptkfp” would probably never be valid in English, since English usually (more or less) follows the sonority hierarchy, meaning that consonants in a row have to go from soft to loud at the start of a syllable, and loud to soft and the end, which “ptkfp” certainly does not follow!
Phonology and phonotactics are often what leads to words changing when borrowed from one language to another. A more noticeable example would be “Mele Kalikimaka” in Hawaiʻian, meaning “Merry Christmas”. It’s not that Hawaiʻian made its own word for “merry” and “christmas”, but just since Hawaiʻian’s phonology is so much more restrictive than English’s, it had to change the words considerably!
My idea was, how about we do the same thing for Hallowspeak! Let’s start with the word “Christmas”, and fix anything that doesn’t follow Hallowspeak’s phonology, to find what the Hallowspeak word for “Christmas” would be! I did in fact do this for Christmas before, but I think I can do it much better than I did then.
First of all, that “ch” at the start of the word actually makes a “k” sound, so we’ll write it like that! This is another source of change for borrowed words: they nearly always borrow the “pronunciation” of the word, not the spelling! We now have “Kristmas”.
The “kr” cluster at the start, thankfully, is completely valid by Hallowspeak’s phonotactic rules. Although, Hallowspeak is still a bit more restrictive than English when it comes to consonant clusters, since the only ones allowed are combinations of “p t k b d g” and “r l w j”. So something like “fr” in the word “from” wouldn’t be allowed.
That vowel “i” actually doesn’t exist exactly in Hallowspeak! The “i” vowel in “Christmas” is the vowel in the word “kit”, but Hallowspeak’s “i” sound makes an “ee” sound like in “beet”. Regardless, “ee” is still the closest vowel sound Hallowspeak has to the “i” in “Christmas”, so we’ll keep it as “Kristmas”.
Where we do run into some problems with the “st” in “Christmas” though. To see why, we’ll use syllable structure notation! A syllable structure sort of a template for each syllable in a language, showing where consonants and vowels can go! In syllable structure notation, “C” represents a consonant, “V” represents a vowel, anything in lowercase means the actual sound (so “V” means vowel but “v” means the sound “v”), and brackets mean “optional”. There are some other symbols too for common types of sound, such as “F” for fricative sounds like “f v th s z sh”, and “L” for liquid sounds like “w l r y”.
English has a very complex syllable structure of (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)(C), which is also often written as (C)3V(C)5 for brevity. This is why English is able to have words like “strengths”, “twelfths”, and “angsts”. On the other hand, Japanese’s syllable structure is less permissive, being only (C)Vn (although it is more complicated than that), which is why the Japanese word for Christmas has to be “Kurisumasu”.
Hallowspeak’s syllable structure is (C)(L)V(C), with some extra restrictions already mentioned. As you can see though, Hallowspeak’s syllable structure only allows one consonant at the end of a syllable, so “Christmas” would be impossible! Thankfully, pretty much no one, at least that I’ve spoken to, pronounces the “t” in “Christmas”, so I’d say we’re safe to just move on with “Krismas”.
There is one more restriction we haven’t mentioned in terms of phonotactics, that being the fact that only certain consonants are able to end a syllable. In harder to understand linguistics terminology, only certain consonants are permitted in coda position. Those consonants are “m n k s p”, so thankfully we’ll have no problems, but a word like “mash” would be impossible, even though Hallowspeak has “m”, “a”, and “sh” sounds.
Finally, is the “a” in “Christmas” actually said as an “a” sound? For most English speakers, the answer is no! Most dialects of English have what’s called “vowel reduction”, which basically just makes any unstressed vowels into little short “uh” sounds, like in “Christm(uh)s”. That “uh” sound is actually it’s own sound in Hallowspeak though, which we choose to write with the letter “y”, so we can use it here!
That leaves us with our final word for Christmas…. “Krismys”!! (say “crease-muhs”)
Applying the same rules to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa gives “Hanuka” and “Kwanza”, although we’re currently also uncertain about whether Hallowspeak has the “kh” sound found in the Hebrew pronunciation of Hanukkah (that’s why you’ll sometimes see it spelt as Chanukkah, English doesn’t have a “kh” sound except if you’re Scottish and saying the word “loch”!). If we manage to prove that this sound does exist in Hallowspeak, we plan on spelling it with an “x”, yielding “Xanuka”.
How did we figure all this out though? As with many things in Hallowspeak, the answer to that question is one of our very first members: DialogBox! While DB is mostly inactive now, he contributed the founding bedrock for our entire project in the beginning! To analyse phonology, you have to look through all the audio you have, write what you hear, and try to collate all the sounds you find and where those sounds appear inside each word. Unfortunately, this is made even more difficult by the last element in the definition of phonology that I gave you: “how sounds change depending on context”.
Take the word “butter” in English. In some dialects , the “t” sound in the middle becomes a little pause called a “glottal stop”, (bu’er), and in other dialects, it becomes more of a fast “r” or “d” sound called an “alveolar tap” (burer, buder). If someone was trying to analyse this, they might think that the glottal stop and alveolar tap sounds are their own sounds in English, when in fact, they’re just different versions of the “t” sound!
Here’s the real terminology for all this. It might sound complicated, but it makes it much less confusing to talk about than saying “sound” for everything. If something is its own sound in a language, it’s called a “phoneme”, and if it’s a different version based on context, it’s called an “allophone”. So, the glottal stop (little pause) and alveolar tap (fast “r”/”d”) are allophones (context based variations) of English’s “t” phoneme (its own sound). For just any sound a human can produce, the word is “phone”.
This is what makes it so hard to analyse phonology! Phones that are allophones (variations) in one language can be totally different unique phonemes in another, so it takes a lot of special techniques to figure out what’s what! I won’t get into all the theory here, since this is more just an introduction to the concept, but the idea of it is to see where all the phones appear, and then see if their possible locations ever overlap. There was even a time when we thought “a” and “e” were allophones in Hallowspeak – which is why they were the same letter in our first attempts at Hallowscript – but we thankfully managed to disprove that idea. Other sounds like the “kh” mentioned earlier, we’re still trying to figure out.
That’s it for this update! I hope these explanations of phonology terms made sense to you, and happy holidays!! Bapa namele Krismysak Xanukak Kwanzak!
Alright everyone! Back from the holidays, and my final year of high school is already absolutely shanking me, but I still have a bit of time every now and again for Hallowspeak!
The biggest order of business right now though is to get the website back running smoothly. Back in July, the whole website was just refusing to open for a lot of people, and so one of our resident programmers, Soren, went to take a look.
A few days later, they had managed to get everything back online! However, a few things did get lost, that being the website styling and a bunch of images from across the site. So that’s what we’re trying to get back as of right now.
After this boring dirty work, though, we do actually have some exciting news about the website, thanks to Zerronyx on the server for looking through Hallowspeak without any prior knowledge, and giving super useful feedback on everything!!
Across the time that the website has been up, we’ve had countless people follow the link on the contact page to the Shellword Ordeal discord server to talk with the Team. They join the server, head over to the Hallowspeak development channel, and ask if they can see the current progress of the project.
But unfortunately, we’ve always had to disappoint them a little, since Hallowspeak’s working document isn’t publicly available, but instead they can ask to see any part of the project as it is now. This is for a number of reasons, mainly that the document right now is full of work-in-progress analyses, tentative theories, and bits and pieces that will likely become obsolete once we find a theory that better explains what we see in game.
Hallowspeak is a growing, changing thing, and so we always felt like letting our working document be public would be a dangerous idea: we don’t want people to try and learn Hallowspeak, or make something of their own featuring it, only for all their effort to be nullified as we change and improve parts of the language.
But we completely understand how much of a gut-punch coming to the server and hearing that would be. For a long while now, people on the Shellwood Ordeal discord server have been free to request to see the current Hallowspeak dictionary. But still, it kinda sucks to not have anything of the sort already on the website. That’s why we’re going to be adding Hallowspeak’s dictionary onto the website, which will be updated every time we find a new word!
There’s also another idea I’ve been holding on to for a while, that’s more in the brainstorming phase right now. A Hallowspeak timeline page! As of right now, we’re not entirely sure on the details of it, but we’re thinking a timeline of all the key events, discoveries, new members, and anything else interesting would be pretty cool to have!
That’s all for now, everyone! Hopefully the next update will have some more progress on the language!
Hi everyone! We’re back!! The exams are all over and it’s the holiday, so we’re all gearing back up to get back into Hallowspeak! Thank you for all the “good lucks” for my exams, and by “good luck” I mean eighteen spambot comments! Seriously why do they keep commenting on Hallowspeak posts in Russian. Why are 92% of our comments spam.
In any case! We’re just getting back into Hallowspeak now, so there aren’t any big updates yet. However, there is something I’ve been saving for a slow spot like this, so that you only have to wait two months for the next update, instead of three! How merciful of me. :p
If you don’t already know, The Shellwood Ordeal discord server is where you can go to request translations of phrases into Hallowspeak! And so, late last year, one of the members of the server requested us to translate a little server inside joke: “Davey, I need cock!”
Since all of the words of the request had an equivalent in Hallowspeak, it could be translated fairly cleanly, and I took that oppurtunity to go through the process of translating it! For each word, I explained not only why I translated it the way I did – including any suffixes that the word needed – but also where and how we found the word in the game, and where our theories for that piece of grammar came from.
All in all, it was a step-by-step, start-to-finish translation with explanation of all the work that lead up to it, all in as beginner-friendly language I could. I think you’ll really enjoy it!
Below is the entire process, copied from The Shellwood Ordeal discord server:
alrighty! for the spectacle, let me go through each step of the process to translating this
so the first word here is “Davey”. you might think this needs no modification since it’s a name, but actually the word davey in that sentence is in the vocative case, which marks that a noun isn’t a participant in the sentence, but instead the person that it is directed to
english doesn’t have a unique vocative case, unless you count “O [name]!”, but Hallowspeak does! we know this from the line “trosje kalimo” from hornet. we don’t know what kalimo means, but trosje is actually tros+je, with je being the vocative suffix to show the statement is directed at tros. we know that because we know that tros means sibling, which is backed up by how the mantis lords say “Trosa!!” before the fight, meaning “siblings!”
so the first word will be Davey-je. if you wanted to write it like Hallowspeak words, it would be Deivije. nothing different, just the way we chose to write Hallowspeak sounds. if you’re wondering about that, make sure to check out the “how to read Hallowspeak” page on our website
now, the sentence structure of Hallowspeak is OVS, which we have proven through countless extensive analyses. that means the thing the verb is being done to comes first, then the verb, then who is doing the verb.
that means in the phrase “i need cock”, the thing that is needed, the cock, will come first.
we have a word for penis! of course it was not taken from the voice lines, and it’s just a joke word. however, it is a Hallowspeak Official joke word! it’s wingazingi, because it sounds funny. each of our joke words has a fun story behind why it was added, and i won’t go into the story behind wingazingi today, but if you want, you can go and try and find it yourself!
the thing that the verb is done to, in this case cock, needs to have a -k suffix to show so. this is called an accusative case suffix. this has even proven over and over again through our many theories, all making this one of the strongest pieces of Hallowspeak grammar
so far, we have “Davey-je, wingazingik…”
now the rest of the sentence: “i need”. like many languages you may be familiar with, such as french or spanish, Hallowspeak shows who is doing a verb by putting a suffix on it. and also like spanish, since the verb shows who is doing it, you don’t need a pronoun.
the suffix for when “i” am doing the verb, is simply nothing. we see verbs with suffixes in the voice lines, and also sometimes verbs without suffixes. and when we go with the lack of a suffix meaning “i” am doing the verb, it makes the most voice lines make sense out of any other option
now the verb “need”. we found this word from snail shaman’s voice lines. you can read the full process in Hallowspeak Update 11. unfortunately, in snail shaman’s line, the word for need has a suffix, which removes the final vowel of the word. for example, hega “prepare” + ek “them” becomes hegek.
that means, we don’t actually know what the last vowel of the word “need” was before the suffix removed it. we have reason to believe that “a” is Hallowspeak’s “default vowel” though, so through an educated guess, we assumed that. so the word for need is “na”
now, we have all the pieces to construct the sentence! the first vocative noun at the start, the noun that the verb is being done to, and the verb, which will have no suffix to show that “i” am doing it.
that leaves us with the final translation:
drumrolls
“Davey-je, wingazingik na!”
i hope you all enjoyed this very thorough translation explanation! i love giving all of you a glimpse into how Hallowspeak functions on the inside!
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.)
Hey folks! As I mentioned in the previous update, this update is going to go into what we discussed and discovered in the last Hallowspeak Live show on the 24th of October!
This Hallowspeak Live was actually the first one we have ever recorded! As of now, we don’t really know how we’re going to release the recording to you all. We might just add it to the website somewhere, or we could possibly make a Hallowspeak YouTube channel. We’re also not sure whether we should edit the recording or just post it as is. We’d love to hear your thoughts on The Shellwood Ordeal discord server!
Now, here’s the story of our main discovery during the show!
After we introduced our new members and worked on their bios for a while, we moved on to doing some live analysis! We were deciding what aspect of Hallowspeak’s grammar to focus on, when a member of the Hallowspeak community, bruhmelon, reminded us of a discussion we had a couple weeks prior.
He had brought up something strange about one of Hornet’s lines: “kala negosa tros”. For a while, we knew this line to be making use of Hallowspeak’s semblative construction; basically a way for an extra phrase meaning “such as [someone]” to be baked into the sentence.
It’s kinda confusing to explain, so let me show you. We discovered this construction in Update 11, from Snail Shaman’s line “kweno nin mea”. This sentence is pretty weird, since it literally translates as “people need fearlessness”, but the “-in” suffix at the end of the word “nin” means “you”. That’s where the semblative comes in, to make the entire sentence actually mean “people like you need fearlessness”!
“Kala negosa tros” follows this too, and while we don’t know what “negosa” means, we know at least that the sentence translates to “siblings like you [something] god”. So what’s the problem with this sentence? Very very astute followers of the Project will notice that the object in the sentence – “kala” – doesn’t have the accusative “-k” suffix that objects are required to have in Hallowspeak!
And look! Going back to “kweno nin mea”, this sentence doesn’t have the accusative suffix either!! What’s up with the semblative construction? There’s even another strange thing about this sentence: the word “negosa” ends with the suffix “-sa”, which is an intransitive verb ending, which just makes no sense whatsoever with the rest of the sentence, since the sentence clearly has an object! And, if the intransitive verb ending is somehow correct here, why don’t any of the nouns have the intransitive case suffix “-n”???? What is going on????
There were a few theories initially. We noted that even though syntactically, one of the nouns should be taking the intransitive based on how the sentence is constructed, none of the arguments are actually the intransitive argument. But this didn’t stick, since that would require the speakers of Hallowspeak to “think around a corner” as Koguri put it. It’s much more natural for a language to just follow it’s normal rules even when they don’t make sense based on the meaning of the sentence.
Some other theories were that Hallowspeak might be in the process of either gaining or losing its cases, and so sometimes they just aren’t used. Another pretty cool theory was that since Hallowspeak cares so much about animacy (both nouns and verbs have different suffixes depending on whether they are animate or inanimate), the grammar does weird stuff when talking about the vessels – beings that are sort of half-animate. We didn’t end up using this theory, but I think it should be kept in mind for future analysis since it seems like the vessels’ weird agency stuff would affect Hallowspeak in one way or another.
The final theory though, proposed by Koguri, would end up holding the most water. They had the idea that maybe, the sentence is just easier to say without the “-k” suffix on kala and kweno. This seems like a bit of a cop-out, but this actually happens in many languages! It’s called elision, and we had some trouble finding good examples of this in English, but Wikipedia mentions how for many English speakers, the ‘t’ at the end of ‘first’ isn’t pronounced in a phrase like ‘first light’.
With this theory seeming to make the most sense out of them all, we needed to check if it held up across all the voice lines. First, we did the most narrow search with the information we had: just checking if any words in the voice lines end with a k while the following word starts with an n. And, to our surprise, we didn’t find any! This theory was absolutely true!
But it would be pretty unlikely if that was the only place this elision happened – surely there were some other pairs of consonants that weren’t allowed next to each other! To figure this out, we looked at what kinds of consonants k and n are! /k/ is known as a plosive, while /n/ is known as a nasal. (The slashes around the consonants mean that you’re talking about their sounds). We went one level further though, since nasals are a type of resonant. So we went ahead and checked all the other combinations of plosives and resonants, and none of them ever show up!!
With this, we discovered a new phonotactic rule! A plosive consonant is dropped at the end of a word, when the next word begins with a resonant consonant. This explains why there is no “-k” suffix at the end of kala or kweno – the next word in both of those sentences begins with an n! This discovery also allows us to see “hidden” suffixes in a way, so our grammatical analysis can be a lot more accurate too!
That was a great discovery, but there are still more mysteries about Hallowspeak’s morphosyntactic alignment and its syntax! Like, we still don’t know why the verb in kala negosa tros has an intransitive verb suffix on it. Plus, we still have the “mek emno es kucin” line to analyse, which has proven completely impenetrable so far.
That’s it for this time folks! Tune in next time to see how we deal with these mysteries!
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.
Hey, quick website-only note before the actual update. This update was posted on the server weeks ago, but it’s only being added to the website now. This update contains a lot of explanations of pretty confusing linguisic concepts. I tried to make the explanations as clear as possible, but I’m known for being pretty bad at explaining things.
The explanations in the update went through a few versions before getting to here, which is why it’s being put on the website so late. Anyways, with that out of the way, enjoy the updateǃ
. . .
Hey everyone! I know it’s been a while since the last update, but we have some really exciting new discoveries to share!!
But before we get into the big new theory, let’s have some follow-up from the previous update’s thoughts. The current big mystery in Hallowspeak is the ‘n’ suffix – it’s everywhere but we don’t know what it means! Last update, the leading theory was that it was some kind of locative suffix: a case suffix that shows that the verb takes place at whatever noun the suffix is attached to.
This strange ‘n’ suffix seemed to appear in places where we’d expect another case to be used, and also sometimes showed up with a different case right after it! But the locative theory explained this all! The location that something happened can come almost anywhere in a sentence, and the other case on top of it might be clarifying what kind of locative it is (specifically into rather than in or at).
It was looking like this theory was perfect! So we tried applying this locative meaning to the voice lines that have the ‘n’ suffix. Let’s take a line from Quirrel: “Belo ba nakoden.”. He says this when you’re at the big tube with Monomon inside it, but the dialogue that is shown is different depending on whether you can use the dream nail on her.
The clip “Belo ba nakoden” plays over the lines “Ahh, but her mind is still locked to you. That final powerful protection stays in place.” and “Do not hesitate. The choice to reform was hers, not mine. She knows what you would do and seems to welcome it.”. So we needed to find a literal translation of “belo ba nakoden” that used this locative meaning and also fit with both voice lines.
The main guess was something like “Her mind to us…” We already knew that “ba” was used to mean “my”, from Zote’s dialogue. But this translation assumed that “ba” wasn’t just “my”, but any sort of possession: “my”, “your”, “his”, “her”, etc. We already had the idea in the last update that the dative case ‘o’ suffix combined with the locative case ‘n’ suffix would mean something like ‘to’, and the word belo could be bel+o! Lastly, ‘ba’ and ‘becuro’ are both things relating to the first person ‘I/we’, so maybe ‘bel’ was related too?
Putting it together, we get a literal translation of “Belo ba nakoden” that fit both pieces of dialogue that it plays over! Both lines are basically about how Monomon’s mind is to Quirrel and the player: either ‘locked’ or ready. Presumably, the line would continue has “her mind to us… …is locked” or “her mind to us… …is ready”.
For a while, this theory seemed to be completely sound. Everything lined up so well…. But recently, we discovered one big problem….
A week ago, we finally held another Hallowspeak Live show! For those who don’t know, Hallowspeak Live is when the Hallowspeak Team streams themselves analysing voice lines and working on Hallowspeak, live, for everyone to participate in! We also have a Q&A section in the middle to break up all that hard work :p
During that stream, we realised something about this theory. Remember, Hallowspeak has OVS (Object, Verb, Subject) word order. One of the reasons the locative theory was looking so strong was that a locative argument can come almost anywhere in a sentence. But if we went with the translation ‘her mind to us…’, then ‘nakode’ wouldn’t be a locative argument! It would be the subject!
So, during the show, we set out to find a theory that could confidently explain why the subject of this sentence is taking a different case than it should be.
And we found it.
To understand the new theory though, I need to explain morphosyntactic alignment. So the normal roles in a sentence are the subject and the object – who is doing the action, and what it’s being done to. Pretty much every language agrees with this. However, what about if the verb is intransitive, and only takes one argument, like ‘The dog sleeps’? The dog is doing the sleeping, but the sleeping is also being done to the dog! English has decided that in this situation, the dog is the subject. However other languages say that the dog should be the object.
English’s decision to have the dog be a subject there is called nominative-accusative alignment, and having the dog be the object there is called ergative-absolutive alignment. If it helps to understand, in a language with ergative-absolutive alignment, they would say ‘Sleeps him’ instead of ‘He sleeps’. Yeah, the terminology is pretty confusing :p (note: this is a slight simplification that ignores active-stative alignment and split ergativity, but that doesn’t matter for the new theory. you’re free to go learn about those things yourself though!)
These two kinds of alignment are the most common in the world, but if you think about it, there is one more. What if the dog in ‘The dog sleeps’ isn’t a subject or an object, but is given its own role altogether? One role for when something both does the verb, and experiences it. This is called tripartite alignment, and is super rare in real life. But we already know that Hallowspeak has different verb endings for intransitive verbs, so this actually fits really well in Hallowspeak!
Now, how does this solve the ‘n’ suffix problem? Well, in a language with nominative-accusative alignment, the subject (and the dog) takes the nominative case, and the object takes the accusative case. Likewise in languages with ergative-absolutive alignment, the subject takes the ergative case, and the object (and the dog) takes the absolutive case.
But in a language with tripartite alignment, the subject is in the ergative case, the object is in the accusative case, and the dog – the one who does the action and also experiences it – is in the intransitive case. (again, the terminology is really all over the place lol)
Everything after this point was discovered during the Hallowspeak Live show.
Now look at the sentence ‘belo ba nakoden’. We already know that the accusative case is shown with a ‘k’ suffix, and none of the words here have that, so we know that there’s no object here. That means the verb only has one argument, meaning it is intransitive. So, the subject here should take the intransitive case. And would you look at that, the ‘n’ suffix marks the intransitive case, and Hallowspeak has tripartite alignment!!!!
That would make ‘belo’ the verb, but then why doesn’t it have a verb ending on it? The correct verb ending that ‘belo’ should have is the third person intransitive suffix. Let’s check what that suffix is!
Oh yeah! We were never able to find the intransitive verb endings for the third person! For some reason, they just never showed up anywhere! But maybe, it’s not that we never found them, but actually that they are just nothing? In many languages, a verb without any verb ending is by default third person, so this makes sense from a linguistics perspective.
So if the intransitive third person verb ending is just blank, then ‘belo ba nakoden’ is a perfectly good sentence! It could mean something like ‘Her mind is waiting’ or something like that. Crowan’s idea was that it means ‘My journey is finished’ or ‘My purpose is complete’, since this is the last thing Quirrel needed to do.
After this super successful theory, we went on to try it for the other voice lines that have the ‘n’ suffix! Like ‘sarena negeno’ from Tiso, which he says over the text ‘Garrgh. What a calm place. It’s action I want, vicious and deadly battle. This serenity is a bore’. Wait a minute. ‘sarena negeno’… doesn’t have a verb at all!
This sure stumped us for a while, but we have a theory to explain this too! We think that putting a noun in the intransitive case without a verb means ‘There is [noun]’. Why? Well, the way that you say ‘there is/are’ is different across different languages, and usually isn’t a direct translation of ‘there is’. In French, it’s ‘il y a’, which literally means ‘it has here’.
Many other languages have a separate verb for ‘there is’. It would be like if you said ‘dogs exist’ instead of ‘there are dogs’. Imagine if Hallowspeak had this verb. It’s intransitive, so the noun would go in the intransitive case. But maybe, since the bugs use this verb so much, it quickly got shortened. Shortened more and more, until eventually, it just disappeared, but leaving the intransitive case on the noun behind!
These are some of my favourite kinds of theories in Hallowspeak! Instead of just looking at the language as it is now, we theorise on the past of Hallowspeak to figure out how it got to where it is now. We’re theorising on what Old Hallowspeak was like in order to explain current Hallowspeak!!!
Now we have all the theories together, let’s test them out on the rest of the voice lines that have the intransitive case suffix!
‘Sarena negeno’ could mean ‘there is peace instead of violence’, with the dative ‘o’ suffix on ‘negeno’ meaning ‘instead’. As Midsu showed us during the show, there’s like a million meanings that the dative can convey, so this isn’t out of the question.
‘Omis kadina’ from Millibelle, which plays over ‘Have you reconsidered opening an account? Losing geo is a terrible thing.’. If ‘omis’ is a verb meaning ‘to be bad’, then the sentence could mean ‘losses are bad’. This might seem a bit strange to English speakers, but adjectives also being verbs that mean ‘to be [adjective]’ is a thing that happens in loads of languages in real life.
‘Das manuran’ from Cloth, which plays over ‘Ah tiny warrior. I’m glad I could see you again. You’ve inspired me! I’m about to head off in search of other places and other foes’, and ‘I look forward to our next contact tiny saviour. Then, you’ll meet a warrior with the courage to meet your own’. It could be that ‘das’ here is a verb, but we actually thought it could be an adjective meaning ‘other’. The sentence could mean something like ‘there are other warriors’, which I think fits both of the lines of dialogue.
That’s all the lines we tested during the Live show, but there are still a few more we need to do now, including the ravenously confusing ‘mek emno es kucin’ line from Cornifer, which we’ve been pulling our hair out over for months!
Looking at this new theory (or pair of theories to be precise), this is looking so good! It manages to fit all the lines we tested it on so far, and explains it all way better than the old locative theory ever could have! Unless we find an even better theory, I’m sure we’ll have this new theory proven by the next update!!
I hope you all enjoyed this much longer and more in depth update! Tune in next time!
