Seems like yet another desolate week for the Hallowspeak Team, unfortunately! Not really any progress has been made. đ However, I can go over some future points that we now have to work on!
First off, we have something coming off from last weekâs discovery of the plural! As well as the plural suffix, nouns also take case suffixes (for those who donât know, they mark the nounâs role in the sentence, like the difference between she and her). The question now is, which suffix comes first? That should be a quick thing to figure out.
But that isnât the end of it! Now that we have one grammatical number, could there be more? Thatâs right! If you werenât aware already, there are more grammatical numbers out there than just singular and plural! Things like dual for two objects, and paucal for just a few objects, as well as some more unique ones like collective for a group of something, and singulative for just one instance of a mass noun! Does Hallowspeak have any of those? Thatâll be quite a challenge to figure out!
Next! How many tenses does Hallowspeak have? Currently we have two forms of the verb: unmarked (no suffix) which is almost always the present tense, and a word before the verb indicating past tense. Now you may be thinking, âWell, if you have present and past, all you need now is future!â However, that isnât the case! In some languages, that is all the tenses. Not âpast present futureâ, but âpast and non-pastâ! And many languages even have more tenses! Surprisingly to some, including English! Think about the difference between âgoing to do somethingâ and âwill do somethingâ. Theyâre both the future tense, but the first is near future, and the second is distant future! Tenses in languages can go extremely far!
Now, pronouns! So far, we only have the reflexive pronouns (yourself myself etc), since theyâre actually the same as the reflexive verb endings! We also have one possessive pronoun: âmyâ, but we donât know any of the others! And of course, we need normal pronouns! Itâs likely that Hallowspeak is pro-drop, meaning that, since whoâs doing the action is marked on the verb, you donât actually need to include the pronoun! This is going to make it really tricky!
And finally, there are probably tonnes of other affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in Hallowspeak! To find these, weâre going to need to continue those morphophonemic transcriptions that we mentioned in Hallowspeak Update 1, for all the voice lines in the game! That way, we can find any common affixes weâve missed, and by looking at the places and contexts that they appear, we can figure out what they mean!
As you can see, we really have our work cut out for us! I hope you found this more future-oriented update interesting! Tune in next time! Cya