Aaaalright, and thus concludes our Team Cherry impression ! Hope you all enjoyed a year of no news ! Wait, you guys didn’t know that’s what we were doing….? You thought we just didn’t do anything for basically a year…?
…Yeah, you’re right. Oops !
Anyway ! What’s new with us ? Well, Crowan’s doing college stuff, Mops moved out and got a new job, Koguri got diagnosed as “got that shrew in them” (ADHD), basically everyone has started baking bread for some reason, and I as you can see, have started putting spaces before my !s and ?s. Oh, and also, like, university applications. I got five uni offers, yippee !!
While I’m sure most of you do care a little about what’s going on in our lives (I’d hope, at least), I’m also sure what you’re really here for is.. well, a Hallowspeak update. So, I wont keep you waiting any longer !
Since last update, it’s mainly just been little tidbits here and there, ideas and theories being thrown around and discussed, but they’re still interesting.
We’ve had -do and -dos in our verb agreement table for a while now as intransitive verb endings for the 3rd person, which makes it kind of strange that Mask Maker’s lines have things like “Kalama-dos” and “Kalakma-do”. Kala is a noun, it means “god”, and kalama/kalakma are both forms of kala that we understand. The question then becomes, why are there verb endings directly following a noun ? Are these verb endings somehow suffixed onto a noun ? Or are they able to exist as standalone words too ? There’s a decent sized handful of voice lines that seem to have this “-do” thing, so we do have some material to work with when trying to figure this one out.
Chroma’s been working on writing out glosses (which are like a structural way to write out sentences for the purposes of analysing grammar) for some of the trickier seeming voice lines we’re looking at. As always, the terrible spectre of curo name is haunting us. It’s not an auxilliary construction, because sometimes both words are conjugated, and it’s not a split-headed agreement system because sometimes neither word agrees with anything else in the sentence !!! Waaaarghhh !!!!
Is it weird that so far the copula, the verb that means “to be” in Hallowspeak, only has three forms, whereas most other verbs have far more ? Usually it’s the other away around, think about how in English a verb like “to like” basically only has “like”, “likes”, “liked”, and “liking”; but “to be” has “am”, “is”, “are”, “was”, “were”, “being”, etc. Pretty much every language in the real world that has a copula is similar, yet in Hallowspeak it’s the other way around. Don’t get me wrong, it totally could be correct, but it still seems to us a little like we’re missing something…!
We’ve also been more abstractly discussing some more syntactic things, basically trying to figure out how to make sentences more complicated than “person – action – thing”. Stuff like content clauses (eg. “I know what you are.”) and verb chaining (eg. “I want to start thinking about going“). Before analysing the voice lines directly, we like to think about what we already know and come up with ideas for how something could work, so we kinda know what we’re looking for. Hallowspeak’s syntax has proven pretty unique already though (Remember how in Hallowspeak a sentence like “I saw her” is said more like “Her saw I”), so figuring out how more complex sentences could be said is tricky in its own right. The details are a bit too technical to talk about in an update without actually leading to any discovery yet, but if you want to hear about it you can ask me in the server !
Apart from that, there was a lot of squinting really hard at screenshots going “what is even going on in this line” that we started but still need to follow up on : stuff that didn’t really get far enough yet to include in this update.
However, and I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear this, it is pretty much unanimous across the whole Hallowspeak Team that we want to get back into working on Hallowspeak more. Of course, it’s not that simple, as evidenced by our one year plus Team Cherry impression (okay, joke’s getting old now), but do know that we’re still passionate about this project, and we will keep working on it, however fast or slow it ends up going.
Thank you to everyone who stuck with us, on the Discord server or elsewhere, during this whole time. We’re so glad to have people excited about our silly linguistics project. We’re still answering questions and having chats about the project on the server, so as always feel free to join there if you want to ask anything or talk about Hallowspeak !
Until hopefully less than a year from now, then. Thanks for tuning in !
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Oh also Koguri got a pet snake. Let’s… let’s hope it doesn’t eat them.