Wwwwwwwwwhats up Hallowspeaksters ?! It’s ya girl, ghost here, back for another EPIC Hallowspeak Upda
Okay yea I’ll stop I’m not sure what that was about really. Anyways hiiii !!! As always, let’s start with what’s new with us ! I graduated !!! And I’m in ENGLAND now ???? This country is very weird and sometimes I feel like everyone here is insane but I live here now ! So that’s pretty cool i guess :3
Oh also – just putting it here – we did a few little bugfixes around the website so the Meet The Team page should have all its images back to normal, and the hover-over linguistic term explanations should render correctly again.
Anyways ! We’ve decided to take a bit of a different strategy in deciding what we look into going forward. Chroma has been getting the dialogue lines from the game and trying to translate them into Hallowspeak using what we have. Obviously, pretty much all but the very simplest lines are fully translatable right now, but that’s the point ! Doing this exercise shows us what grammar bits we most need to find in order to make more complex sentences.
Of course it’s not that simple though : we can’t just decide we need a particular grammatical feature and pick something from the voice lines to fill that role. Moreso this is just to gather a list of things to look out for ; common grammatical structures – stuff needed for pretty much any sentence longer than four words – that we still haven’t found equivalents of in the voice lines yet.
In other words, things used so commonly, no matter the language, that we still somehow haven’t found evidence for!
What things are those exactly ? Well ! One: clause-chaining ! We pretty much have no idea how Hallowspeak puts multiple clauses in a single sentence. Some languages like to say things like “I ate a pizza and then went home.”, while other languages prefer to say “Having eaten a pizza, I went home.”, and some languages (like English) are fine with either. We still don’t know how Hallowspeak does it though ! And assuming the residents of Hallownest speak with a higher than first grade reading level, they definitely use some strategy to link clauses !
Second on the priority list, possessive constructions ! Different languages express possessive constructions in a wide variety of different ways. Is it “Bob’s book”, “The book of Bob”, “Bob his-book”, or something else ? Possessives are also sometimes used for more abstract ‘linking’ relationships rather than simple ownership – think “City of Tears” – so we really want to find out how they work !
About that second one, I think I might actually have a sneaking suspicion on what Hallowspeak’s strategy for it might be. If that theory ends up going anywhere… you guys may just get another update quite soon after this one…!
Oh also, that’s not the only extremely useful organisational work Chroma has done ! They’ve also gone and found the actual audio files for every voice line, so we don’t need to go onto Youtube to reference them, and they’ve put together a collection of every single one of our theories (not just the recent ones, I mean all the way back since the soft reset !) along with all the pieces of evidence we used to arrive at them. This means new theories have all the relevant information right there for us to analyse, and if ever we need to rethink a prior theory, it’ll be far easier since we’ll know exactly what led us to the conclusion we made.
Now, for a bit more of that Hallowspeak update drama and mystery you’ve all come to know and love…
Someone recently reached out to DB on reddit about making Hallowscript keycaps ; a super cool idea ! if not for the fact that Hallowscript isn’t a cipher, and so “Hallowscript keycaps” is a bit of a meaningless, nonsensical phrase, unless you’re also making a Hallowscript keyboard layout.
Initially, I was pretty hesitant to respond to this person and have them join the server. The existence of “Hallowscript keycaps” could imply that Hallowspeak is just a cipher, rather than the fully fledged language we’ve been working to create. And honestly, in my personal opinion, I think the conflation of conlangs and ciphers is the biggest poison to the conlanging community, understating the work it takes and trivialising the artform in the minds of non-conlangers. (That’s why you’ll see clarification about it repeated all over this website.) And with Hallowspeak having a much larger non-conlanger following than a lot of other conlanging projects, that wasn’t a risk I wanted to take.
Some of us wanted to accept their request and work with them to produce something out of this project, rather than the far more nebulous ‘progress’ that we’ve been making for the past… five years ?
Others of us insisted that they’d rather have the project produce ‘nothing’ for even more years to come, rather than play any part in serving to further the misleading misconceptions about our hobby and its community.
However, we discussed the idea that, if this person really wants to make a Hallowscript keyboard, then if we explained to them why “Hallowscript keycaps” wouldn’t be what they imagined, they might be determined enough to actually help us to achieve that goal, even after learning what would actually go in to doing it.
And so, DB reached back out to them and invited them to our server. They accepted the invite and joined, and we all welcomed them to the Project ! And then… no reply…? More than two weeks later, they still haven’t said a single word in the server…! Not even a response to us saying welcome… Nothing in any of the channels.
They’re like a ghost, which is perhaps fitting given as their profile picture is one. But really, this is… kinda really weird ? Honestly, I don’t even know if I want to ping them and say like “Hey dude! Are you there? What happened?”, because this whole thing just kinda weirds me out ! Did we scare them off…? Was the server too inactive and they decided the project was too slow for them ? Were we too gay and transgender for them to handle ??
Perhaps we’ll never know. This seems like it probably wont go anywhere anytime soon. But that isn’t the only odd occurance that’s happened recently…
It’s no secret that the Mysterious Server Deletion of ’22 is the biggest tragedy to ever happen to this project ; one that, honestly, we never fully recovered from. If the decreased speed of progress of this project can be attributed to anything – apart from like, us all growing up – then it’d have to the morale impact of that event.
However, what we didn’t realise… what we didn’t realise this entire time… was that somehow, a few of our members are just, not in the new server ! That’s right, a couple of our members just aren’t in the current Hallowspeak Dev server ! And these aren’t members who used to be super inactive either :
We just suddenly made the realisation that Soren, the person who basically made this entire website, is completely missing from the dev server ! And then, looking deeper, we realised it’s not only him, but Bash too, a member of the Council of Grammar !
Trying to figure out what had happened, we found Bash’s username and reached out after all this time. (And – unrelated – judging by their current user profile, it seems they go by she/her now.) Turns out we had sent her a link to the new server, but it seems like she never joined… I’ve asked her what happened, but as of this update being published, she hasn’t answered yet.
Even more confusingly though, is Soren ! We haven’t been able to reach back out and ask him what happened… Because none of us seem to even have his contact anymore ! He’s gone from all our friends lists, which is especially weird if he ended up deleting his account, since on discord, deleted accounts still show up as “Deleted User”, they don’t just disappear.
We… don’t really know exactly what to do about this ! We don’t have a plan in any case. While very surprising though, we aren’t too scared about it at this point. We’ll just have to see what comes of this, and see whether we can get them back.
Anyways, that was the Update for you all ! I hope you enjoyed, and see you next time !