Hey folks! As I mentioned in the previous update, this update is going to go into what we discussed and discovered in the last Hallowspeak Live show on the 24th of October!
This Hallowspeak Live was actually the first one we have ever recorded! As of now, we don’t really know how we’re going to release the recording to you all. We might just add it to the website somewhere, or we could possibly make a Hallowspeak YouTube channel. We’re also not sure whether we should edit the recording or just post it as is. We’d love to hear your thoughts on The Shellwood Ordeal discord server!
Now, here’s the story of our main discovery during the show!
After we introduced our new members and worked on their bios for a while, we moved on to doing some live analysis! We were deciding what aspect of Hallowspeak’s grammar to focus on, when a member of the Hallowspeak community, bruhmelon, reminded us of a discussion we had a couple weeks prior.
He had brought up something strange about one of Hornet’s lines: “kala negosa tros”. For a while, we knew this line to be making use of Hallowspeak’s semblative construction; basically a way for an extra phrase meaning “such as [someone]” to be baked into the sentence.
It’s kinda confusing to explain, so let me show you. We discovered this construction in Update 11, from Snail Shaman’s line “kweno nin mea”. This sentence is pretty weird, since it literally translates as “people need fearlessness”, but the “-in” suffix at the end of the word “nin” means “you”. That’s where the semblative comes in, to make the entire sentence actually mean “people like you need fearlessness”!
“Kala negosa tros” follows this too, and while we don’t know what “negosa” means, we know at least that the sentence translates to “siblings like you [something] god”. So what’s the problem with this sentence? Very very astute followers of the Project will notice that the object in the sentence – “kala” – doesn’t have the accusative “-k” suffix that objects are required to have in Hallowspeak!
And look! Going back to “kweno nin mea”, this sentence doesn’t have the accusative suffix either!! What’s up with the semblative construction? There’s even another strange thing about this sentence: the word “negosa” ends with the suffix “-sa”, which is an intransitive verb ending, which just makes no sense whatsoever with the rest of the sentence, since the sentence clearly has an object! And, if the intransitive verb ending is somehow correct here, why don’t any of the nouns have the intransitive case suffix “-n”???? What is going on????
There were a few theories initially. We noted that even though syntactically, one of the nouns should be taking the intransitive based on how the sentence is constructed, none of the arguments are actually the intransitive argument. But this didn’t stick, since that would require the speakers of Hallowspeak to “think around a corner” as Koguri put it. It’s much more natural for a language to just follow it’s normal rules even when they don’t make sense based on the meaning of the sentence.
Some other theories were that Hallowspeak might be in the process of either gaining or losing its cases, and so sometimes they just aren’t used. Another pretty cool theory was that since Hallowspeak cares so much about animacy (both nouns and verbs have different suffixes depending on whether they are animate or inanimate), the grammar does weird stuff when talking about the vessels – beings that are sort of half-animate. We didn’t end up using this theory, but I think it should be kept in mind for future analysis since it seems like the vessels’ weird agency stuff would affect Hallowspeak in one way or another.
The final theory though, proposed by Koguri, would end up holding the most water. They had the idea that maybe, the sentence is just easier to say without the “-k” suffix on kala and kweno. This seems like a bit of a cop-out, but this actually happens in many languages! It’s called elision, and we had some trouble finding good examples of this in English, but Wikipedia mentions how for many English speakers, the ‘t’ at the end of ‘first’ isn’t pronounced in a phrase like ‘first light’.
With this theory seeming to make the most sense out of them all, we needed to check if it held up across all the voice lines. First, we did the most narrow search with the information we had: just checking if any words in the voice lines end with a k while the following word starts with an n. And, to our surprise, we didn’t find any! This theory was absolutely true!
But it would be pretty unlikely if that was the only place this elision happened – surely there were some other pairs of consonants that weren’t allowed next to each other! To figure this out, we looked at what kinds of consonants k and n are! /k/ is known as a plosive, while /n/ is known as a nasal. (The slashes around the consonants mean that you’re talking about their sounds). We went one level further though, since nasals are a type of resonant. So we went ahead and checked all the other combinations of plosives and resonants, and none of them ever show up!!
With this, we discovered a new phonotactic rule! A plosive consonant is dropped at the end of a word, when the next word begins with a resonant consonant. This explains why there is no “-k” suffix at the end of kala or kweno – the next word in both of those sentences begins with an n! This discovery also allows us to see “hidden” suffixes in a way, so our grammatical analysis can be a lot more accurate too!
That was a great discovery, but there are still more mysteries about Hallowspeak’s morphosyntactic alignment and its syntax! Like, we still don’t know why the verb in kala negosa tros has an intransitive verb suffix on it. Plus, we still have the “mek emno es kucin” line to analyse, which has proven completely impenetrable so far.
That’s it for this time folks! Tune in next time to see how we deal with these mysteries!