Unfortunately, its deployment in the show is... uninspired. As such, I'm not going to bother much with quotations in context, because there just isn't anything to analyze! All Sangheili dialog (with the exception of one word, which we'll get to later) is just straightforwardly subtitled, with no attempt at affordances for comprehensibility in the construction of the dialog, acting, or set design. This kind of surprised me given the general film industry avoidance of long stretches of subtitles (maybe the stigma is going away now that we all need subtitles all the time anyway?), to the point that I tried to find some artistic motivation behind that choice. And I did come up with a possible one, which maybe somebody else would actually use--subtitling with no other affordances does, at least for me, have the effect of making a scene understandable while maintaining a certain emotional distance from the characters involved, compared to the English-speaking characters whom I can understand effortlessly. That's a good thing for bad-guy aliens! However... they do exactly the same thing with, e.g., Korean dialog in the series. And I don't think we are supposed to be emotionally distant Korean-speaking humans!
In order to attempt to make sense of this, I reached out to C. Buck on Twitter to see if he or David had any insight into the creative process for using the Sangheili language in the series. And, well... the answer is "no". Pretty much what I expected, but still disappointing. Quote:
The language creation is very much driven by how and when the writers and/or producers decide they want to use it, in order to enhance the story, or add depth to the narrative. While David and I did quite a bit of work on the grammar, and how the language works, ultimately, the syntax, lexical features, and in some ways the rhythm of the language is where our decision making ends. The rest is very much in the hands of the show-runners.
This is standard in the industry right now, but despite being standard, it is something of a sad state of affairs. I would think that if a production is going to hire a linguist, they might at least consider asking for their input on linguistic issues! Note that that doesn't mean I expect such input to always be acted on--consultants of all types are routinely ignored in film and TV production when it turns out that realism gets in the way of the plot--but it would be nice if showrunners at least were interested in what options were available to them! Oh well. Baby steps.
Sangheili also highlights a generic problem with conlangs in sci-fi film contexts: they are always designed to be pronounced by human actors (though, see Star Trek: Discovery, to be covered in a later article), possibly with some electronic distortion added in post. This makes sense--actors wanna act, and modelling and synthesizing an alien vocal tract is a whole lot of work. So, we just sort of all accept this standard trope that all aliens have human-like vocal tracts--it's not that much of an additional stretch when we are already accepting that most aliens are humanoid-with-funny-foreheads anyway! But Halo makes its aliens at least a little bit weird--not just humans in costumes with prosthetics. And it makes them weird in ways that obviously and significantly impact their vocal tracts! The Elite Covenant soldiers don't even have lower jaws! So the idea that all of the various species in the Covenant can speak one language, and that that language is also compatible with human physiology, just stretches my suspension of disbelief a little bit too far. In improving in one category, the show's creators have highlighted the deficiencies of another.
However! There is one shining beacon of linguistic awesomeness in this show. In episode 4, we get this conversation:
-"I know what a Needler is, Kai."-"Well, the Covenant have another word for it. What is it again?"-"Qkhep'os."-"Oh, yeah, that's it. Qkhep'os. Qkhep'os."-"Correct"-"How-- How do you know that?"-"Well, that's what they say when we turn it on them. Though I guess it could just mean, [Crap], please don't kill me."-"Also correct."
They highlighted The Gavagai Problem! That's the kind of sweet, sweet linguistic science popularization that I am here for!
This is the impetus for realizing that the Spartan soldiers, who have had a lot of close contact with Covenant soldiers, might be very useful for decoding the Sangheili language. And a few seconds later, we get this lovely frame:
There's a spectrogram! With time-aligned IPA transcription! Somebody was trying, and that makes me happy.
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