Qerenoka

See also Covenant languages.

Pan Sangheili, Common Sangheili or Imperial Sangheili is the common name for the Covenant's lingua franca. Formally, the language is known as Qers'nok, after the original language chosen as the Covenant's common language at the time of the Writ of Union.

Pan Sangheili is a stripped-down variant of Aristocratic or "High" Sangheili, having a simpler synthetic syntax, fewer inflectional morphemes, etc.

Design goals
The goal with Pan Sangheili is to create a conlang that's more interesting than just an English relex, but also not too ambitious or complex. This doesn't need to be a fully-usable conlang (not right now anyway), but it would be useful to have a basic framework for what sounds are possible and how words and phrases are constructed. Mostly we should just have a consistent ruleset to be able to generate names, phrases, and idioms consistently.

Modern Pan Sangheili's relationship to the original, Writ of Union-era Qers'nok is roughly similar as that of modern Spanish or French to Latin, and perhaps even more distant. Because Qers'nok is spoken by a vast collective, it is by nature highly eclectic, being more aptly described as a language family than a singular language and encompassing hundreds if not thousands of dialects and subvariants, many of which are only barely mutually intelligible or not at all. The version of Qers'nok documented here describes "Pan Sangheili", or the standardized version of the language spoken in High Charity, as of the early to mid-26th century. Pan Sangheili is spoken natively by much of the Covenant population, but also serves as an auxiliary language to those who speak either divergent dialects or entirely unrelated languages. Even so, Qers'nok should not be understood as being universal to the entire Covenant population.

Possible trait brainstorming

 * Use of enclitics (c.f. "Senatus populusQUE Romanus")?
 * Possible basic vowel harmony
 * Integrated honorific system that positions the speaker's status relative to the adressee (will have to look into how these work; e.g. Turkish and Japanese have these)
 * Possibly separate tenses for recent past/ancient or mythological past?
 * What if the vowels in a word sometimes lengthen based on how the word is being inflected?
 * Diminutive affixes
 * The Halopedia page for the Sangheili language has some conjecture on the phonology and structure based on 343i's depiction, but this should be taken with a grain of salt as it's mostly the work of a single user and makes multiple assumptions based on limited information. It can be useful, but we don't have to be beholden to it.

Existing examples
These can be useful for figuring out the sound and look of the language, what kinds of syllables and sounds occur commonly, etc. If there are some clear irregularities from phonesthetic trends in names we've come up with, we can see if some things need to be readjusted or retconned. However, if some of these seem to diverge from a clear trend, we can also handwave these deviations as not being from Standard Sangheili; having more than one name for a place in different languages just makes the world richer and more layered. But most Covenant worlds have a "Sangheilized" name, namely those featured in official documentation, and by and large those have to abide by the general rules of Standard Qers'nok, even if they are derived from the endonym (and they always aren't).


 * Names
 * Thel 'Vadam
 * Rtas 'Vadum
 * Xytan Jar 'Wattinree
 * Parala 'Ahrmonro
 * Voro Nar 'Mantakree
 * Jul 'Mdama

The apostrophe before the surnames can be rationalized as a stress marker; perhaps stress is by default on a syllable other than the first one, so you mark the first word to indicate you stress the "VA" in "Vadam", for instance.


 * Other
 * Unggoy
 * Kig-Yar
 * Lekgolo
 * Huragok
 * Malurok = Decided Heart (note the semantic compactness here)
 * N'gaeh'eewoy: this is supposed to literally mean "my blood is my honor", but may create too ambitious of an inflectional structure so I'll likely change the meaning (e.g. "Blood-honor")
 * Osh'nak Vuranna = Concord of Reconciliation, literally "Concord Reconciliation(genitive)" (there is either no "of", or its use is more restricted)

The Covenant tendency to use "Adjective Noun" in names is integrated to the structure of the language and doesn't work like in English (e.g. "Joyous Exultation" vs. "Saepon'kal"; the adjective is usually compounded into the word and comes after the noun; qualities can easily be affixed into nouns this way). But sometimes these kinds of names aren't even formed from separate words in the original language; e.g. there is a distinct concept for "glorious proclamation" in Sangheili (Kaa'shash), and the English translation has to resort to two in order to capture the meaning. Plus it's already become a solidified translation convention when it comes to Covenant phrases, so most translators roll with it. Often the original Covenant names (for ships, worlds, etc.) may also contain more semantic content than is conveyed in the English equivalent, but ONI and UNSC translators especially seek to keep their translations as curt as they can; yet we do end up with names like "Long Night of Solace", which is a shorter phrase in the original language and has very specific cultural connotations.

Phonology
The Sangheili have a rather bizarre facial anatomy, but they can sound like Keith David or Robert Davi. It's difficult to explain how their vocal tracts work, so all we can really say is "very well" (it likely happens in a separate cavity within their throat, likely also involving the nasal cavities, etc).

Many sounds once present in ancient Qers'nok and other Sangheili languages have disappeared from Pan Sangheili, leaving only sounds that can be produced in some way by most of the Covenant's member species; mainly the San'Shyuum. Overall, Writ of Union-era Qers'nok featured more guttural sounds than the modern Pan Sangheili, which does not utilize the Sangheili's entire vocal range. As something of a quirky equivalent to human click sounds, some native Sangheili languages utilize a range of whistles and roars which cannot be reproduced by most species.

Glasslands claims Sangheili can't properly pronounce "P", but then within pages of that claim, the Sangheili phrase "Neru pe'Odosima" is introduced. I suppose one could argue this is a quirk of the Romanization system where "p" stands for some totally different sound, but this would seem very unwieldy; regardless, Glasslands is not regarded as canon in Daybreak, so we can ignore it and assume they can produce at least some form of "p". (Given we have names like "P'thon".)

The sound inventory can actually be rather minimalist, so there's less chance of sounds being confused with one another; this may have been one reason Sangheili was chosen over the native San'Shyuum language, which would have produced more difficulty for the Sangheili to learn and pronounce due to its more intricate sound differences.

Sounds listed here are approximations created to be intelligible in the original tongue while being pronounceable to humans. Similar ambiguities apply to the different species in the Covenant.

Resource for IPA symbols: https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/

Vowels
6-7 vowels?

At least these occur: a, e, i, o, u, y

All vowels occur in short and long versions, which are semantically differentiated. In addition to these, there are various diphthongs.

Phonotactics and phonesthetics
Phonesthetic inspiration from Greek, Japanese and possibly Old Norse

Sangheili is relatively vowel-heavy like Japanese; e.g. there are a lot of cases where you can't end words/syllables with certain consonants (though "m" and "n" are quite common in word endings). Consonant clusters are fairly restricted (e.g. 3 consonants rarely occur in a sequence, and more than that are broken up by vowels or stops)

Syntax
Word order: Subject-Object-Verb, with all but the verb being variable? Partially free depending on emphasis. Coupled with noun classes and misc. inflectional features, this allows other words in a sentence to be shuffled around.

Pan Sangheili could be categorized as agglutinative or semi-fusional. "High Sangheili" or Aristocratic Sangheili uses a lot more synthetic structures (ie a lot of meaning can be expressed in single words via affixes etc), whereas common Sangheili (especially when spoken colloquially) is more isolating (i.e. it breaks things down into discrete units like English or Mandarin, though not to the same extent). The level of agglutination is probably roughly something between Latin and Turkish.

Grammar
Inspirations for features: Latin (basic bread-and-butter features), Turkish (case system, honorifics), possibly Japanese (e.g. honorifics, adjectives)

Compound words of two or more are a common way of creating concepts and can be freely created on the fly (c.f. German). In Romanization, hyphens or spaces are often (but not always) added between the words to denote where one "word" ends and another begins (field master, artisan-armorer, battle-song, etc; this makes some phrases rather similar to those found in old Anglo-Saxon or Norse poetry) In English, some of these translations may sound clumsy (especially if compounds of more than three words are translated in full) but they work very naturally in the native Sangheili.

Grammatical gender could instead use a more novel type of noun class system, such as that in Swahili (which separates words into 18 categories based on level of animacy), though ours doesn't need to be nearly this elaborate; e.g. a Sapient-Nonsapient-Inanimate categorization might work. Notably, these systems don't have to be consistent and in natural languages they rarely are; so you would find inanimate things in the animate category, for example (Forerunner relics could be one non-random example of just that).

Robust grammatical case / declension system (something like Latin's 5 or Sanskrit's 6 cases seems reasonable)

Verbs inflect for tense and mood. This system could be mostly lifted from Latin, with some quirks (e.g. a causative tense would be a fun way of forming verbs. E.g. "to make die" > kill)

Stress: An apostrophe (e.g. Thel 'Vadam) indicates stress on the syllable that follows; otherwise (ie. by default) stress is always on the last syllable?

Pronouns could incorporate honorifics and politeness like in Japanese, though the same degree of complexity might be a bit ambitious.
 * In addition to pronouns, the agent performing an action can be and often is expressed as part of a verb; this can be expressed with an added pronoun but is often indicated by the verb tense.

Adjectives: Adjectives can be a separate word class, or they can be merged with verbs (or some of them can; e.g. Japanese has a few different kinds of adjectives). For instance, "I am tall" would be structured as "I am talling (or tall-being)".

Lexicon
When inventing the vocab, we have to consider the Sangheili/Covenant semantic space: where are they coming from, what do they regard as important, and what they don't, and which meanings they map to things. Languages don't map out 1:1 in words and phrases, especially with alien cultural contexts. Words have local context and meaning that doesn't carry over when you translate, and the very ways words are used can be radically different. (So a "literal" translation can actually be a worse one than a non-literal one that captures the meaning of the phrase better.) The semantic content created in one's head depends entirely on cultural and environmental factors. So, what is that context? Some features that could have an impact on the language: An all-encompassing religiosity, caste-based society, warrior culture, millennia of spacefaring, importance of community and family bonds, etc.

There is a notable difference between inventing a new vocabulary vs. re-encoding the English vocab. Things that are different words in English don't necessarily need to be different in another language (e.g. "sailor" and "mariner"). These are different because they came from different sources, but an alien language won't have that history. Equally, the opposite can be true - they would distinguish concepts we don't even think of. Let's say "space" and "outer space" could be words of totally different origin (the latter maybe translating to "void" or something), or one for interstellar and in-system space, and so on. Slipspace doesn't need to be a "space" at all but may derive from totally different origins. Or, in some cases distinctions may exist, but they are less frequently used only used when the distinction needs to be made.

Examples
 * "Sangheili" as a name is somewhat equivalent to "Earthling", in that it is derived from the planet and came after space travel? Different word for "people" or species designation that got gradually supplanted? "Sanghelios" means (or originally meant) "earth-sphere" or "earth air sphere" (could also have evolved into a word for world or planet)? (note that the Lights of Sanghelios are called Helios for short, so this also has to make sense unless we assume a very lax translation convention)

Number system
Sangheili uses a base-12 numbering system, which might be related to their 12 digits.

An easy way to express negative numbers, like an affix/prefix? Could be related to way to express a negative of something, or negation, in general.

Writing system(s)
Main writing system is an abjad or abugida? (no characters for vowels, but they are indicated through diacritics in the consonant characters)?

Consider ease of writing in logographic script - ie morphemes & roots represented by logograms

Romanization
The language and romanization system we use is an approximation of the original language made for human use, as we cannot perfectly replicate all the original sounds. This also explains any possible irregularities. However, the romanization system is meant to be as straightforward, literal and uncomplicated as possible for clarity's sake. Sangheili romanization more or less uses the Latin alphabet phonetically, though there are some cases where a word's or name's pronunciation has previously been ambiguous and has caused an erroneous spelling to be coined as standard.

I've used diareses (e.g. Raah chïwei), but what do they (and other diacritics) indicate? E.g. if the vowel is pronounced separately from its surroundings. E.g. the "ï" in chïwei is not an English-style "ai" but is pronounced like the i sound at the end of the word.

Diacritics could also indicate sounds that are not silent in an environment where an English speaker might normally assume they are (e.g. Quenya does this).

Apostrophes denote stress on the next sound.

343i has taken a liking to using Klingon-style capital letters mixed amid words to indicate... something (e.g. QezoY'asabu, 'sKelln), but other than make the language seem more stereotypically "alien" (probably because we associate it with Klingon) it doesn't seem to contribute much; personally I think it just makes the romanization look more untidy. It doesn't help that we're already trying to distance our depiction of the Sangheili from the "discount Klingons" they're often portrayed as.