Hallowspeak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-k	-ka
-km	-kma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kala:

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

Kere:

• kerektis

Kik:

• kika

Citari:

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

Mane:

• manema

Me:

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

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

Goan:

• goan
• cegoan

Mini:

• minima

Tros:

• tros
• trosje

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

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

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

“Please db. We need you now.”

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

“Save us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is going on?!!!!!

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

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