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!!