Happy Friday everyone, or Saturday for some of you. This update is a bit late as usual; we were busy doing very important linguist activities. Anyway, as with all things, there are highs and there are lows, and this week we didn’t make a lot of substantial progress, but we have some things to look forward to.
The Codey Bois (haha isn’t that a funny name? yes) said they would work on the website which is good, because the website hasn’t been updated in like forever and basically functions as a message box for people who find the old updates on reddit and want to know if we’ve made any progress.
The reason it hasn’t been updated in forever is because Dylan (½ of the Codey Bois) is the only one who can edit the site, and he vanished for over a year and hadn’t really been active until recently. Apparently he got a full time job, like some kind of functioning adult ? . The plan now is for Mops (2/2 of the Codey Bois) to code shit for the site and for Dylan to just approve it. We’re hoping the site can become kind of a homepage for the project, where we can post updates, and maybe have bios for each team member.
As you all were made aware in the last update, we’ve settled on the Austronesian Alignment theory, so now all that’s left to do in the way of confirming it is to check it against the voice lines. Whenever we come up with a theory, the last step in confirming it as canon in Hallowspeak is to verify it by checking all voicelines where it would apply, and see if it makes sense. Unfortunately, the dialogue in Hollow Knight is gibberish, and was never meant to be interpreted like this. Team Cherry basically told the actors to recite gibberish. So there will be cases where a line doesn’t quite work, and we might need to employ some Artistic License™ to figure out how it can work.
Since Austronesian Alignment isn’t one grammatical structure (it’s a word order) it has to apply to every sentence in Hallowspeak. Because of that, we’re going to have to check every single voice line from the game (disregarding things like interjections), which will be very time consuming.
“uhhghhhsghg yeag yeah i hope excited about website!! uh things testing theory next time! haha hope you enjoy! tune in next time!” – mish