Hallowspeak Update 23

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!!!!