Category: Language Updates

Alrighty fellas! Today we have a super exciting development, so I’m just gonna get straight into it! You’ll never believe it! Only two weeks after we proved the causative theory (check update 21), we have another huge grammatical feature proven!! Yeah, you heard that right! (or read it, i guess). It seems like the big boost in Team morale that we saw last week really did pay off!!

So without further ado, here’s the issue: We have been struggling with two very difficult problems for months now: the issue of noun morphology, and the infamous “curo namyn”. Since this time we have actually solved these problems, I’m gonna take some time to briefly explain both of them first.

The noun morphology problem: We currently have three suffixes that can stack on nouns. The accusative suffix “-k” which marks that the noun is the object of the sentence; the definite suffix “-m” which means “the”; and the plural suffix “-a”. These should be able to stack in any combination. A noun being the object doesn’t stop it from being plural; it having a “the” doesn’t stop it from being an object; and the same for every other combination. The problem? Some of these combinations break the phonotactic rules of Hallowspeak, meaning the rules of which sounds can go where. For example the k suffix + the m suffix would be “km”, but how do you pronounce that? The first thing we did was look to the voice lines to see how Hallowspeak solves these issues. However, some combinations of these suffixes don’t show up anywhere in the voice lines at all! Why?!

Then, the so called “infamous” curo namyn problem: This little phrase, “curo namyn” appears once in Quirrels lines, and all over in Zote’s monologue (the voice line used for when he’s in Dirtmouth). Alright then, so it’s just a common, simple phrase that’s used a lot, right? Well, nope! “Curo namyn” means…. “to be have yourself”…… WHAT?

So those are the two huge problems that Hallowspeak has been facing, for nearly 4 months. Yeah. But as I said, this week we think we’ve actually solved both of these enormous, longstanding questions! Let’s start at the beginning, and look at the noun morphology. This is what it should look like in the accusative, which is where the phonotactic problems are.

	SG	PL
INDF	k	ka
DEF	km	kma

Now, looking through the voice lines, the only one that doesn’t appear anywhere is “km”. But wait.. Do you remember two updates ago, when the causative theory was proven? It showed that the “accusative” suffix could also be used for something being the causer of something else! And, when you look at all the appearances of “kma”, they’re all actually the causative…

Does this mean that the definite + accusative just doesn’t appear anywhere? If you remember from waaayyy back, we said that only animate nouns can take the definite suffix, and for inanimate nouns the definiteness is ambiguous. (This was because the m suffix is less common than we’d expect, and also because it shows up in the animate verb endings).

That means that… the suffix that can only go on animate nouns can’t combine with the accusative suffix.

So.. most likely, animate nouns just can’t take the accusative suffix. Which means animate nouns can’t be objects?

Hehe, those who have been following these updates will know where this is going. That’s right folks!! The austronesian alignment theory is officially proven!!!!! Austronesian alignment is when the subject must always be more animate than the object. In a language like Hallowspeak with only two levels of animacy – animate and inanimate – this means that animate nouns can’t be the object of a sentence, so the accusative is never needed for them. That’s why we never see the accusative definite combinations; because that would be against the austronesian alignment rules!

For example, a sentence like “The man sees the tree” would be following the rules, since the subject (the man) is animate, and the object (the tree) is inanimate. However the sentence “The rock hits the man” would be breaking the rules, since the subject (the rock) is inanimate, and the object (the man) is animate!!!

But of course, languages that have austronesian alignment still need some way to say “the rock hits the man”! So how do they do it, if it breaks the rules? Well, they can use some voicing tricks such as a passive to swap the roles around! Lemme show you! Using the passive, the sentence “the rock hits the man” becomes “the man is hit”, and then we can add the rock back using a preposition, making “the man is hit by the rock”. See, fixed!

Although now.. this creates another question… How do you say the passive in Hallowspeak?? Well, since I started this update by telling you about the long-standing “curo namyn” problem, I’m sure you can guess what our solution is :p but let’s go through this step by step. A passive is a valency changing operation, like the causative from two updates ago; except instead of adding another argument to the verb, the passive removes one. That’s why we had to add the rocks back to the sentence with a preposition: the passive made the verb intransitive, so it could only take one argument (the man)!

Now, here’s the big realisation: that “yn” at the end of “namyn” is an verb ending specifically for intransitive verbs! The passive in an intransitive verb! And the reason it’s quite common, is because it’s needed to say certain types of sentences due to the austronesian alignment! Think about it! The “curo namyn” never actually shows up like that – the curo is always inflected, either “becuro namyn” or “tocuro namyn”. Why would these two verbs be marked differently? Well, maybe one refers to the new subject, and the other refers to the old subject that’s being added back!!

This looks to be a good, solid solution to the “curo namyn” problem that we’ve been dealing with for months, that even goes with the other grammatical features that we’ve discovered. Keep in mind that this problem is just solved now, but not actually proven. To prove it, we’ll have to check all the places that it appears in the voice lines to see if it fits. However this solution seems so perfect, I’m pretty sure that by next week, it’ll be proven!!!

Alrighty guys, now for the Team update! Now, you guys won’t believe this! There’s been a huge crazy development in the Hallowspeak Team lore! I’d say it’s some crazy tea, but nobody says tea! Get ready for this guys, haha! Guess what! Last Tuesday, Hallowspeak Member Chroma plainly admitted to being a tsundere!

Here, we have the direct quote from the tsunie himself!

Incredible! Amazing! Hah!!! What an exciting story in the Hallowspeak Team! Such an unexpected development!! Folks, you heard it here first! But that’s now where this story ends! Upon this huge big reveal from Chroma, Member friendly ghost (that’s me c:) responded by adding a new emote to the Hallowspeak server. Check this out!

The Tsunie Emote!!!!!!

Hehe, okay that was silly. Thanks for reading this week’s update, and I hope you enjoyed this method of showing our discoveries! Tune in next time!!!!

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!!

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