Hallowspeak

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

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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!

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!!