Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa to everyone!!!
Unfortunately, I still haven’t had the time to write up the enormous update that will be required to go through everything that’s happened since Update 40, but I do have a bit of time to give you all some Hallowspeak content for this festive season!!
There’s been some mention of Hallowspeak’s phonology, specifically phonotactics, in the Hallowspeak Development channel recently, so I thought I’d take that opportunity to give that some explanation! Don’t worry, you’ll see how this is festive soon!
So, the phonology of a language is everything concerning the language’s sounds: what sounds it has, where those sounds can go, how the sounds change depending on context, that sort of thing. Phonotactics is specifically that second one: no language just allows all sounds to come in any position in a word. Even though “ng” “a” “p” “t” “k” and “f” are all sounds in English, “ngaptkfp” could never be an English word, and most English speakers would probably have a pretty hard time saying it! That is because of phonotactics! English allows the “ng” sound only at the end of a syllable (“thing”, “rang”, “language”), but never at the beginning of a syllable (the bane of anyone named Nguyen :p). On top of that, the cluster “ptkfp” would probably never be valid in English, since English usually (more or less) follows the sonority hierarchy, meaning that consonants in a row have to go from soft to loud at the start of a syllable, and loud to soft and the end, which “ptkfp” certainly does not follow!
Phonology and phonotactics are often what leads to words changing when borrowed from one language to another. A more noticeable example would be “Mele Kalikimaka” in Hawaiʻian, meaning “Merry Christmas”. It’s not that Hawaiʻian made its own word for “merry” and “christmas”, but just since Hawaiʻian’s phonology is so much more restrictive than English’s, it had to change the words considerably!
My idea was, how about we do the same thing for Hallowspeak! Let’s start with the word “Christmas”, and fix anything that doesn’t follow Hallowspeak’s phonology, to find what the Hallowspeak word for “Christmas” would be! I did in fact do this for Christmas before, but I think I can do it much better than I did then.
First of all, that “ch” at the start of the word actually makes a “k” sound, so we’ll write it like that! This is another source of change for borrowed words: they nearly always borrow the “pronunciation” of the word, not the spelling! We now have “Kristmas”.
The “kr” cluster at the start, thankfully, is completely valid by Hallowspeak’s phonotactic rules. Although, Hallowspeak is still a bit more restrictive than English when it comes to consonant clusters, since the only ones allowed are combinations of “p t k b d g” and “r l w j”. So something like “fr” in the word “from” wouldn’t be allowed.
That vowel “i” actually doesn’t exist exactly in Hallowspeak! The “i” vowel in “Christmas” is the vowel in the word “kit”, but Hallowspeak’s “i” sound makes an “ee” sound like in “beet”. Regardless, “ee” is still the closest vowel sound Hallowspeak has to the “i” in “Christmas”, so we’ll keep it as “Kristmas”.
Where we do run into some problems with the “st” in “Christmas” though. To see why, we’ll use syllable structure notation! A syllable structure sort of a template for each syllable in a language, showing where consonants and vowels can go! In syllable structure notation, “C” represents a consonant, “V” represents a vowel, anything in lowercase means the actual sound (so “V” means vowel but “v” means the sound “v”), and brackets mean “optional”. There are some other symbols too for common types of sound, such as “F” for fricative sounds like “f v th s z sh”, and “L” for liquid sounds like “w l r y”.
English has a very complex syllable structure of (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)(C), which is also often written as (C)3V(C)5 for brevity. This is why English is able to have words like “strengths”, “twelfths”, and “angsts”. On the other hand, Japanese’s syllable structure is less permissive, being only (C)Vn (although it is more complicated than that), which is why the Japanese word for Christmas has to be “Kurisumasu”.
Hallowspeak’s syllable structure is (C)(L)V(C), with some extra restrictions already mentioned. As you can see though, Hallowspeak’s syllable structure only allows one consonant at the end of a syllable, so “Christmas” would be impossible! Thankfully, pretty much no one, at least that I’ve spoken to, pronounces the “t” in “Christmas”, so I’d say we’re safe to just move on with “Krismas”.
There is one more restriction we haven’t mentioned in terms of phonotactics, that being the fact that only certain consonants are able to end a syllable. In harder to understand linguistics terminology, only certain consonants are permitted in coda position. Those consonants are “m n k s p”, so thankfully we’ll have no problems, but a word like “mash” would be impossible, even though Hallowspeak has “m”, “a”, and “sh” sounds.
Finally, is the “a” in “Christmas” actually said as an “a” sound? For most English speakers, the answer is no! Most dialects of English have what’s called “vowel reduction”, which basically just makes any unstressed vowels into little short “uh” sounds, like in “Christm(uh)s”. That “uh” sound is actually it’s own sound in Hallowspeak though, which we choose to write with the letter “y”, so we can use it here!
That leaves us with our final word for Christmas…. “Krismys”!! (say “crease-muhs”)
Applying the same rules to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa gives “Hanuka” and “Kwanza”, although we’re currently also uncertain about whether Hallowspeak has the “kh” sound found in the Hebrew pronunciation of Hanukkah (that’s why you’ll sometimes see it spelt as Chanukkah, English doesn’t have a “kh” sound except if you’re Scottish and saying the word “loch”!). If we manage to prove that this sound does exist in Hallowspeak, we plan on spelling it with an “x”, yielding “Xanuka”.
How did we figure all this out though? As with many things in Hallowspeak, the answer to that question is one of our very first members: DialogBox! While DB is mostly inactive now, he contributed the founding bedrock for our entire project in the beginning! To analyse phonology, you have to look through all the audio you have, write what you hear, and try to collate all the sounds you find and where those sounds appear inside each word. Unfortunately, this is made even more difficult by the last element in the definition of phonology that I gave you: “how sounds change depending on context”.
Take the word “butter” in English. In some dialects , the “t” sound in the middle becomes a little pause called a “glottal stop”, (bu’er), and in other dialects, it becomes more of a fast “r” or “d” sound called an “alveolar tap” (burer, buder). If someone was trying to analyse this, they might think that the glottal stop and alveolar tap sounds are their own sounds in English, when in fact, they’re just different versions of the “t” sound!
Here’s the real terminology for all this. It might sound complicated, but it makes it much less confusing to talk about than saying “sound” for everything. If something is its own sound in a language, it’s called a “phoneme”, and if it’s a different version based on context, it’s called an “allophone”. So, the glottal stop (little pause) and alveolar tap (fast “r”/”d”) are allophones (context based variations) of English’s “t” phoneme (its own sound). For just any sound a human can produce, the word is “phone”.
This is what makes it so hard to analyse phonology! Phones that are allophones (variations) in one language can be totally different unique phonemes in another, so it takes a lot of special techniques to figure out what’s what! I won’t get into all the theory here, since this is more just an introduction to the concept, but the idea of it is to see where all the phones appear, and then see if their possible locations ever overlap. There was even a time when we thought “a” and “e” were allophones in Hallowspeak – which is why they were the same letter in our first attempts at Hallowscript – but we thankfully managed to disprove that idea. Other sounds like the “kh” mentioned earlier, we’re still trying to figure out.
That’s it for this update! I hope these explanations of phonology terms made sense to you, and happy holidays!! Bapa namele Krismysak Xanukak Kwanzak!