Hallowspeak

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citari:

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

-caro:

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

Tono:

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

Me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKING NEWS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems like yet another desolate week for the Hallowspeak Team, unfortunately! Not really any progress has been made. 🙁 However, I can go over some future points that we now have to work on!

First off, we have something coming off from last week’s discovery of the plural! As well as the plural suffix, nouns also take case suffixes (for those who don’t know, they mark the noun’s role in the sentence, like the difference between she and her). The question now is, which suffix comes first? That should be a quick thing to figure out.

But that isn’t the end of it! Now that we have one grammatical number, could there be more? That’s right! If you weren’t aware already, there are more grammatical numbers out there than just singular and plural! Things like dual for two objects, and paucal for just a few objects, as well as some more unique ones like collective for a group of something, and singulative for just one instance of a mass noun! Does Hallowspeak have any of those? That’ll be quite a challenge to figure out!

Next! How many tenses does Hallowspeak have? Currently we have two forms of the verb: unmarked (no suffix) which is almost always the present tense, and a word before the verb indicating past tense. Now you may be thinking, “Well, if you have present and past, all you need now is future!” However, that isn’t the case! In some languages, that is all the tenses. Not “past present future”, but “past and non-past”! And many languages even have more tenses! Surprisingly to some, including English! Think about the difference between “going to do something” and “will do something”. They’re both the future tense, but the first is near future, and the second is distant future! Tenses in languages can go extremely far!

Now, pronouns! So far, we only have the reflexive pronouns (yourself myself etc), since they’re actually the same as the reflexive verb endings! We also have one possessive pronoun: “my”, but we don’t know any of the others! And of course, we need normal pronouns! It’s likely that Hallowspeak is pro-drop, meaning that, since who’s doing the action is marked on the verb, you don’t actually need to include the pronoun! This is going to make it really tricky!

And finally, there are probably tonnes of other affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in Hallowspeak! To find these, we’re going to need to continue those morphophonemic transcriptions that we mentioned in Hallowspeak Update 1, for all the voice lines in the game! That way, we can find any common affixes we’ve missed, and by looking at the places and contexts that they appear, we can figure out what they mean!

As you can see, we really have our work cut out for us! I hope you found this more future-oriented update interesting! Tune in next time! Cya

Alright everyone! While it hasn’t been the most eventful week, there are a few things to talk about! But first, some follow up from last time!

Out newest member, Yoshimidsu, who was welcomed into the Team in the previous update, has been settling in wonderfully! We are super glad to have her in the Team and sure that they will bring many new discoveries to the Project.

As well as this, we also have the return of an old member, @Bash !! Nuhrii was one of the people who went completely silent during the Great Hallowspeak Cheddening event that I talked about a while ago. Now, he has returned after some stuff happened in his life!! We are incredibly happy to have this wonderful linguist back, and wish him all best!!

[…]

Now, some information on the Hallowspeak Language itself! This is probably going to be a weekly segment too: Mish being a dumb dumb! Ages ago, I analysed the “-a” suffix that a few words from the voice lines seem to have. The suffix appeared both attached to “tros” (sibling) in the Sisters of Battle’s “Trosa!”, and in the many adjective Zote’s “Zota!!”. Seeing as these were both battle cries, I interpreted this suffix as being an emphatic suffix, the equivalent of a grammatical exclamation mark. In fact, I even came up with a dumb backstory involving word final vowel loss (which has no evidence other than this)! However, I am only now realising that this is way more complicated than it needs to be!

For ages, the Hallowspeak Language has been missing a vital element of grammar: the plural. Do you see where this is going? Both of those uses of the “““emphatic”””, “Trosa!” and “Zota” make perfect sense if that “-a” suffix was a plural instead! This is a much simpler explanation, and I’m honestly a little embarrassed that I didn’t notice it earlier!! In any case, we now finally have a plural!!

And that’s it for the Weekly Hallowspeak Update! Tune in next time!

Alrighty! Some new developments have happened this week! The new and improved full Hallowspeak dictionary has been started! There’s only a few words right now, since we still have to transfer them from the old dictionary. (We can’t just copy and paste, since the new dictionary has things like word class, notes, and reason, as well as the fact that some words are no longer correct). And it is looking amazing thanks to our wonderful document designer @Chroma (potato) ? ! The new and clean Hallowspeak document is really shaping up!

[…]

Now, some absolutely incredible news!!! You may remember The Great Hallowspeak Cheddening, where the server became desolate and inactive for way too god damn long. This was in no small part due to nearly half of our members simply no longer talking at all in the development server! Now, in the wake of this tragedy, with perfect timing, we’ve received a new member!!!!!! Let’s welcome Yoshimidsu to the team!! She contacted us via email and as quickly added to the server for interviewing. They quickly proved to have linguistic and conlanging knowledge, as well as being very interested in the project, and being a cool person. We are super glad to have a new member in the family! (and this isn’t just a word choice, the Hallowspeak members all have a role called family c:). As for the ched members? They have all rightfully been punished with a role called “Ched”, that has a horrible grey colour.

That’s it for the Hallowspeak Update! Stay tuned…? Yeah!

Suprise! The Hallowspeak Team server is still ched lol. But rather than leave it at that, I’m gonna go through the things we’re currently working on, as well as where the project is currently.

The “Hallowspeak soft reset” thing from the Hallowspeak news (check pins) is going very well!! The current documentation is way simpler and cleaner and less cluttered than the original document. Everything we’re working on is clearly laid out and organised 🙂

Our verb endings table is almost fully filled in! Only 3 more to go probably or maybe some of them are the same who knows. Our case endings seem pretty sound too.

Currently we’re working on finding out more information about Hallowspeak’s word order. It’s pretty confusing because word order involves the position of different word types: verbs nouns adjectives etc, but that’s pretty hard to figure out when you don’t know what the words mean at all, so have no way of telling what word type they are. Ok jk some affixes give away what word type for example verb endings only go on verbs no shit but it’s still hard as dicks.

We also could do with figuring out number, that’s stuff like singular and plural and stuff, as well as tenses, since we only have past and present now.

To aid with that, and also to find any other affixes we can (oh yeah affixes are prefixes or suffixes I forgot to say), we’ve started to do morphophonemic transcription which is a big word but not actually that complicated. Morphophonemic transcription is breaking down all the voice lines into all their parts, and figuring out which bits of words are affixes and stuff. Then, once we know which little bits occur frequently, and are probably affixes, we can figure out what they mean, so we don’t miss anything.

Now, what about Hallowscript? Well the new version of Hallowscript has been put on hold for a while now, since we’ve figured out a new way to find out the letters. Previously, we just assigned symbols to sounds based on how frequently the sounds appear, (more common sounds have less complicated symbols), but like that actually makes no sense so we’re not doing that with the new version. What we’re now going to be doing is finding words in the English meanings of the lore tablets that we know in Hallowspeak, and then trying to find that word in the actual lore tablet image, and then using that to figure out the letters. Now that’s worked for 4 letters so far, but obviously in order to do that, we need to know more words, so that’s why we’re focusing on that instead.