Hiya! I’m sure before you read any more of this update, the first item of news should be obvious: the Hallowspeak Updates aren’t really going to have a consistent schedule anymore.
The Team Members’ schedules aren’t always going to have time for Hallowspeak, and we’re just a group of friends, not an actual big professional company or something. So, we don’t always actually work on Hallowspeak every week. A lot of the previous updates have just been “haha yeah we didn’t do anything”, and then sometimes a bit of filler. And I didn’t really think that made for very good updates.
(Note: many of these updates were not copied onto the website)
So, from now on, updates will only really go up when we think we actually have something interesting to share.
Now, the news! If you can even remember, last update we saw the budding of a new theory, relating to the “-n” suffix! We showed there how “-n” has to be a case suffix, and couldn’t be anything else!
Then, we hit a problem. Take the line “nadino sonina”. “-ino” is a verb ending, and using Hallowspeak’s OVS word order, that would make “sonina” the subject. But, the subject takes the nominative, and we know the nominative case is the default and just has no case suffix. So… why does the subject here have this “-n” case???
Initially, we thought we made a breakthrough, thinking this was an example of quirky subject (yes that is the technical term). Quirky subject is exactly this! The subject of a sentence taking a case beside the nominative that it should take, usually due to some quality of the verb. So! We thought this was it! This explains it!
But then, we looked just a little closer and found…
…”-n” might not be a case at all.
Let’s go over it. Looking a little closer at some of the places we see “-n” we noticed an inconsistency with the theory that it’s a case suffix. For example, in “okoman ja?” from Sly, yeah, we see “-m” which can only be on nouns, but the “-n” is after the definiteness suffix “-m”. Same thing in “akoman” from Ogrim.
The problem is, the cases as we understand them come before the definiteness. So why are they after here?? The only thing that we know to be after the definiteness is the plural suffix “-a”, but we see the “-n” before the “-a” in loads of places! It looks like the “-n” goes between the definiteness and the grammatical number. But no type of noun suffix we found so far goes there!
So.. is this a new category of noun suffix??? Is it something that isn’t a case, a definiteness, or a grammatical number?
Keep in mind, it’s totally natural for some cases to come in a different place than other cases, so “-n” still could be a case. It’d just be the first time we’ve seen something like this happen, and we already have four cases!
So yeah. We have a lot more information, ideas, and deep analysis to piece together now; but we’re back to being completely confused by this mysterious “-n” suffix!
We have done a little more analysis of something pretty unique that we haven’t talked about before here, but I’ll save that for the next update once it’s more developed! ^-^
Now for the website! We know a lot of you aren’t into linguistics, or don’t know as much about it as us. So these updates with all their technical terms – as much as I try to explain them – can be difficult to understand!
That’s why, for the website, we’re working to implement a feature where you can hover your mouse over any technical term, and have it explained! We don’t know exactly how this will look, but we’re super excited to work on it and make The Hallowspeak Project more accessible!
But of course, we need to know which words need explanations! That’s why, it’d be super helpful if you guys could tell us which words from these updates you don’t understand, so we can write explanations for them all!
That’s all for today folks! Tune in next time!!!