Hallowspeak Update 35

Hey, quick website-only note before the actual update. This update was posted on the server weeks ago, but it’s only being added to the website now. This update contains a lot of explanations of pretty confusing linguisic concepts. I tried to make the explanations as clear as possible, but I’m known for being pretty bad at explaining things.

The explanations in the update went through a few versions before getting to here, which is why it’s being put on the website so late. Anyways, with that out of the way, enjoy the updateǃ

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Hey everyone! I know it’s been a while since the last update, but we have some really exciting new discoveries to share!!

But before we get into the big new theory, let’s have some follow-up from the previous update’s thoughts. The current big mystery in Hallowspeak is the ‘n’ suffix – it’s everywhere but we don’t know what it means! Last update, the leading theory was that it was some kind of locative suffix: a case suffix that shows that the verb takes place at whatever noun the suffix is attached to.

This strange ‘n’ suffix seemed to appear in places where we’d expect another case to be used, and also sometimes showed up with a different case right after it! But the locative theory explained this all! The location that something happened can come almost anywhere in a sentence, and the other case on top of it might be clarifying what kind of locative it is (specifically into rather than in or at).

It was looking like this theory was perfect! So we tried applying this locative meaning to the voice lines that have the ‘n’ suffix. Let’s take a line from Quirrel: “Belo ba nakoden.”. He says this when you’re at the big tube with Monomon inside it, but the dialogue that is shown is different depending on whether you can use the dream nail on her.

The clip “Belo ba nakoden” plays over the lines “Ahh, but her mind is still locked to you. That final powerful protection stays in place.” and “Do not hesitate. The choice to reform was hers, not mine. She knows what you would do and seems to welcome it.”. So we needed to find a literal translation of “belo ba nakoden” that used this locative meaning and also fit with both voice lines.

The main guess was something like “Her mind to us…” We already knew that “ba” was used to mean “my”, from Zote’s dialogue. But this translation assumed that “ba” wasn’t just “my”, but any sort of possession: “my”, “your”, “his”, “her”, etc. We already had the idea in the last update that the dative case ‘o’ suffix combined with the locative case ‘n’ suffix would mean something like ‘to’, and the word belo could be bel+o! Lastly, ‘ba’ and ‘becuro’ are both things relating to the first person ‘I/we’, so maybe ‘bel’ was related too?

Putting it together, we get a literal translation of “Belo ba nakoden” that fit both pieces of dialogue that it plays over! Both lines are basically about how Monomon’s mind is to Quirrel and the player: either ‘locked’ or ready. Presumably, the line would continue has “her mind to us… …is locked” or “her mind to us… …is ready”.

For a while, this theory seemed to be completely sound. Everything lined up so well…. But recently, we discovered one big problem….

A week ago, we finally held another Hallowspeak Live show! For those who don’t know, Hallowspeak Live is when the Hallowspeak Team streams themselves analysing voice lines and working on Hallowspeak, live, for everyone to participate in! We also have a Q&A section in the middle to break up all that hard work :p

During that stream, we realised something about this theory. Remember, Hallowspeak has OVS (Object, Verb, Subject) word order. One of the reasons the locative theory was looking so strong was that a locative argument can come almost anywhere in a sentence. But if we went with the translation ‘her mind to us…’, then ‘nakode’ wouldn’t be a locative argument! It would be the subject!

So, during the show, we set out to find a theory that could confidently explain why the subject of this sentence is taking a different case than it should be.

And we found it.

To understand the new theory though, I need to explain morphosyntactic alignment. So the normal roles in a sentence are the subject and the object – who is doing the action, and what it’s being done to. Pretty much every language agrees with this. However, what about if the verb is intransitive, and only takes one argument, like ‘The dog sleeps’? The dog is doing the sleeping, but the sleeping is also being done to the dog! English has decided that in this situation, the dog is the subject. However other languages say that the dog should be the object.

English’s decision to have the dog be a subject there is called nominative-accusative alignment, and having the dog be the object there is called ergative-absolutive alignment. If it helps to understand, in a language with ergative-absolutive alignment, they would say ‘Sleeps him’ instead of ‘He sleeps’. Yeah, the terminology is pretty confusing :p (note: this is a slight simplification that ignores active-stative alignment and split ergativity, but that doesn’t matter for the new theory. you’re free to go learn about those things yourself though!)

These two kinds of alignment are the most common in the world, but if you think about it, there is one more. What if the dog in ‘The dog sleeps’ isn’t a subject or an object, but is given its own role altogether? One role for when something both does the verb, and experiences it. This is called tripartite alignment, and is super rare in real life. But we already know that Hallowspeak has different verb endings for intransitive verbs, so this actually fits really well in Hallowspeak!

Now, how does this solve the ‘n’ suffix problem? Well, in a language with nominative-accusative alignment, the subject (and the dog) takes the nominative case, and the object takes the accusative case. Likewise in languages with ergative-absolutive alignment, the subject takes the ergative case, and the object (and the dog) takes the absolutive case.

But in a language with tripartite alignment, the subject is in the ergative case, the object is in the accusative case, and the dog – the one who does the action and also experiences it – is in the intransitive case. (again, the terminology is really all over the place lol)

Everything after this point was discovered during the Hallowspeak Live show.

Now look at the sentence ‘belo ba nakoden’. We already know that the accusative case is shown with a ‘k’ suffix, and none of the words here have that, so we know that there’s no object here. That means the verb only has one argument, meaning it is intransitive. So, the subject here should take the intransitive case. And would you look at that, the ‘n’ suffix marks the intransitive case, and Hallowspeak has tripartite alignment!!!!

That would make ‘belo’ the verb, but then why doesn’t it have a verb ending on it? The correct verb ending that ‘belo’ should have is the third person intransitive suffix. Let’s check what that suffix is!

Oh yeah! We were never able to find the intransitive verb endings for the third person! For some reason, they just never showed up anywhere! But maybe, it’s not that we never found them, but actually that they are just nothing? In many languages, a verb without any verb ending is by default third person, so this makes sense from a linguistics perspective.

So if the intransitive third person verb ending is just blank, then ‘belo ba nakoden’ is a perfectly good sentence! It could mean something like ‘Her mind is waiting’ or something like that. Crowan’s idea was that it means ‘My journey is finished’ or ‘My purpose is complete’, since this is the last thing Quirrel needed to do.

After this super successful theory, we went on to try it for the other voice lines that have the ‘n’ suffix! Like ‘sarena negeno’ from Tiso, which he says over the text ‘Garrgh. What a calm place. It’s action I want, vicious and deadly battle. This serenity is a bore’. Wait a minute. ‘sarena negeno’… doesn’t have a verb at all!

This sure stumped us for a while, but we have a theory to explain this too! We think that putting a noun in the intransitive case without a verb means ‘There is [noun]’. Why? Well, the way that you say ‘there is/are’ is different across different languages, and usually isn’t a direct translation of ‘there is’. In French, it’s ‘il y a’, which literally means ‘it has here’.

Many other languages have a separate verb for ‘there is’. It would be like if you said ‘dogs exist’ instead of ‘there are dogs’. Imagine if Hallowspeak had this verb. It’s intransitive, so the noun would go in the intransitive case. But maybe, since the bugs use this verb so much, it quickly got shortened. Shortened more and more, until eventually, it just disappeared, but leaving the intransitive case on the noun behind!

These are some of my favourite kinds of theories in Hallowspeak! Instead of just looking at the language as it is now, we theorise on the past of Hallowspeak to figure out how it got to where it is now. We’re theorising on what Old Hallowspeak was like in order to explain current Hallowspeak!!!

Now we have all the theories together, let’s test them out on the rest of the voice lines that have the intransitive case suffix!

‘Sarena negeno’ could mean ‘there is peace instead of violence’, with the dative ‘o’ suffix on ‘negeno’ meaning ‘instead’. As Midsu showed us during the show, there’s like a million meanings that the dative can convey, so this isn’t out of the question.

‘Omis kadina’ from Millibelle, which plays over ‘Have you reconsidered opening an account? Losing geo is a terrible thing.’. If ‘omis’ is a verb meaning ‘to be bad’, then the sentence could mean ‘losses are bad’. This might seem a bit strange to English speakers, but adjectives also being verbs that mean ‘to be [adjective]’ is a thing that happens in loads of languages in real life.

‘Das manuran’ from Cloth, which plays over ‘Ah tiny warrior. I’m glad I could see you again. You’ve inspired me! I’m about to head off in search of other places and other foes’, and ‘I look forward to our next contact tiny saviour. Then, you’ll meet a warrior with the courage to meet your own’. It could be that ‘das’ here is a verb, but we actually thought it could be an adjective meaning ‘other’. The sentence could mean something like ‘there are other warriors’, which I think fits both of the lines of dialogue.

That’s all the lines we tested during the Live show, but there are still a few more we need to do now, including the ravenously confusing ‘mek emno es kucin’ line from Cornifer, which we’ve been pulling our hair out over for months!

Looking at this new theory (or pair of theories to be precise), this is looking so good! It manages to fit all the lines we tested it on so far, and explains it all way better than the old locative theory ever could have! Unless we find an even better theory, I’m sure we’ll have this new theory proven by the next update!!

I hope you all enjoyed this much longer and more in depth update! Tune in next time!