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!!