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!!