Thalskhon

Thalskhon, colloquially called Jiral, is a preeminent language spoken by the Jiralhanae, particularly on Doisac.

History
Though its early forms were spoken in one of the great empires before the Great Immolation, it later developed into a language of trade among the Jiralhanae as they spread outward with the ships given to them by the Gryunjalla. During the centuries of Jiralhanae diaspora, it splintered into numerous dialects, as each world had little contact with each other, and many tribes only spoke Thalskhon as a secondary language if at all.

After the Jiralhanae's rapid accession to the Covenant, Tartarus and his allies used a form of Thalskhon as a lingua franca among the Jiralhanae, though they were also rapidly adopting the hegemony's common language, Qerenoka. Thalskhon is consequently spoken widely by many Jiralhanae within the Covenant, but not all of its dialects are mutually intelligible. Few of the Jiralhanae colonial populations ever learn the "standard" dialect (defined as the primary trade tongue spoken on and around Doisac), especially after the species' integration to the Covenant and the spread of Qerenoka as a universal lingua franca.

Phonology
As with all alien languages, the sounds listed in the following are approximations or best guesses by the Office of Naval Intelligence to create a standard phonology for Thalskhon in terms understandable to humans. In practice, the actual spoken language is highly varied due to the high number of dialects and non-native speakers, as well as the short time it has enjoyed its hegemonic status among the Jiralhanae.

Phonemes / Romanization

Brackets denote allophones. Note that the romanization scheme differs from that of Qerenoka in several places. There is evidence to suggest that early forms of Thalskhon did not phonemically contrast voiced and unvoiced obstruents, but have since come to do so through the introduction of loanwords from other languages. Vowel length is allophonic and not contrastive, aside from a handful of exceptions (mostly in loanwords). Thalskhon also has several diphthongs.

Phonotactics
The standard syllable structure is (C(C))V((C)C), where v can be either a vowel or a diphthong. There are some restrictions as to what consonantal groups can occur in a word, but overall, the phonotactics are relatively permissive of consonant clustering.


 * Most consonants can act as a syllable onset or be in the word-initial position, though there are exceptions:
 * /ng/ is mostly found word-medially as a result of sandhi phenomena or inflectional forms
 * Any consonant can occur word-finally.
 * The following consonant clusters can occur word-initially:
 * Nasal + stop
 * The following consonant clusters can occur word-medially:
 * Sonorant + stop
 * Sonorant + fricative
 * Sibilant + fricative
 * Sibilant + stop
 * Sonorant + sibilant + fricative
 * Voiced stop + voiced stop
 * Voiceless stop + voiceless stop
 * Nasal + fricative
 * The following consonant clusters can occur word-finally:
 * Nasal + t, d, or k
 * Nasal + velar fricative
 * Voiceless stop + voiceless stop

Morphology
Thalskhon is an agglutinating language with frequent word compounding and moderately complex inflectional structures.

Orthography
Thalskhon is written using various systems, though many speakers prefer the runic alphabet known as khoestem, commonly used in contexts of trade. The Covenant's High Ecumenic syllabary is ill-suited for it, as it is designed for Qerenoka, but it can be written (if imperfectly) with the expanded mode of the Low or Common Ecumenic abugida. Although Common Ecumenic has no glyphs for many of the sounds used in Thalskhon, characters representing similar sounds are commonly used to approximate them. Still, many Jiralhanae prefer to use khoestem (or more localized systems) for their language when not dealing with the Covenant at large, and may mandate their Unggoy or Kig-Yar vassals to learn those systems as well where literacy is deemed necessary for their duties.

Usage in names
Thalskhon is most commonly encountered in Jiralhanae place names and Jiralhanae-related terminology, though due to the variety among the Jiralhanae, names in nonstandard dialects are very common. Most English forms of Jiralhanae given names (e.g. Tartarus, Atriox) do not follow the romanization scheme described on this page and are instead Latinized to a fanciful degree. The names of major places like Oth Sonin, Doisac, Warial and Teash are transcribed reasonably (if not fully) accurately, but more variety exists in the romanization of dialectal names of which there are often many versions, an issue common with Covenant languages.