Hi there, I was just going to point out before this started.
I actually recorded this episode back in April.
But because there were some audio issues
and also because I got distracted with other
projects, it took a while to get it out, but.
I hope that you will still enjoy it.
There's still a little bit of audio futziness, but.
Hopefully I have made it much more listenable.
Thank you.
Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about
constructed languages and the people who create them.
I'm George Corley and with me.
Where are you, Carl?
I'm in Pennsylvania.
Yeah.
So in Pennsylvania, we have Carl Buck, who is the co-creator of
Sangheili and someone who is known in the conlanging community.
So I brought you on mostly talking about Sangheili for the Halo
series, which is on Paramount+, but also just generally about conlanging.
I know that you are into like scripts and things.
Yeah.
Writing systems has been one of my key interests in the conlanging
pursuits that I've undertaken, but I do enjoy conlanging in general.
Yeah.
Can you just at first introduce yourself and like how you got into conlanging?
Sure.
So as you mentioned, my name is Carl Buck,
and I currently live in Pennsylvania.
Many years ago, when I was around nine years
old, I received a book on codes and ciphers.
This may come as a surprise to some folks, but
that was before the internet was really a thing.
So I began to develop interest in codes, ciphers, cryptography is the academic term.
As I pursued this, I began to learn about Arabic and Chinese.
I got a Chinese dictionary when I was just a couple years older,
about 11 or so, and I became fascinated with the Hanzi of the
Chinese writing system, logograms, ideograms, etc.
With that interest became a lifelong pursuit in understanding, not
just languages and linguistics, but how writing systems work,
mainly based on my fascination with Chinese.
And that led to several pursuits of languages on my own, as well
as joining several online communities and exploring those interests through those.
Well, that's, that's great.
And how is it that you, so you, you collaborated with David Peterson
on the Sangheili language.
How did you get involved with Halo?
Well, prior to 2019, I didn't really have any involvement.
David was hired by the studio to produce the language.
He wanted someone to collaborate with because
his knowledge of Halo, as he put it, was minimal.
He put out an announcement via Twitter or the site only known as Twitter.
I, I responded to that announcement.
I showed him some of my work.
We spoke on the phone once and then a second time about a week
later, and he had narrowed it down to three people by that time.
He chose me, I think, primarily because of my military experience.
I served in the army from 1996 to 2002.
I think the fact that I had that military experience is what one
of the primary reasons he chose me because Halo is a very militaristic game.
It's, you know, first-person shooter kind of game.
And I think he was looking for some of that insight into into
the language to add some of that to the language and we did during the process.
We talked about certain warrior concepts or warrior culture that
exists and we implemented a lot of that into some of our language creation.
Yeah, and that's that is a big part of the world building and
like the scenarios of the game and the show.
I don't know like how far into like political thing, but like
the political world building the game itself goes into because
I only played like a tiny bit of Halo when I was younger, but
like, but like watching the show through that it's all about
this, this war between humanity and the Covenant, which is that
yeah, which you created the language for the Covenant.
And like the humans have sort of fallen into sort
of like a fascist dictatorship kind of thing.
And then the the Covenant are religious zealots
with it seems like it's multiple species.
-It is. -That take different combat roles.
-Yeah -It is.
And when we were first when we were first working on the
development side, one of the questions that we took back to
the studio was are we making only one or are we
going to contribute any to the varied species?
Because when you get into the lore of the games, there are
multiple species involved and we were told pretty well, you
know, this is supposed to be sort of the Covenant's
language sort of a lingua franca for the Covenant.
It doesn't belong necessarily to one species
or another as far as the show is concerned.
So it was more or less just give us one good language that
we can use amongst the species because the Elites and then the council they speak it.
So yeah.
Was was there a like a concern in the design process
of like making sure this would be a language that all of these
different species could speak because like physiologically
the the Elites and the Prophets and the the Grunts, they're
all pretty different and also pretty different
in how their mouth parts are structured.
That is exactly.
Yeah.
No, you're exactly right.
And that's an excellent question.
So when we were going when we were having the conversations
with the studio, David took it upon himself to draw some pictures
of the Elites' mandibles and their facial structure.
The physiological question was one of our primary questions.
And if you look at some of the grammar that we included most
especially the instrumentals, we focused on the Elites because
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but in the
show, you actually see the elites speak it more than anyone
else save for maybe one of the council members when they're
talking back and forth to Makee and if you really keep tabs,
she's the one the human is the one who speaks it the
most out of everybody that speaks it on the show.
I think that's partly due to Charlie Murphy's skill but also
due to the writers and producers wanting to focus
on her and her interaction with the Covenant.
I don't know.
That's my guess based on watching the show.
But know the mandibles thing.
We really took that into account.
And if you look at the grammar, there's an aspect of certainty.
And so we say they're using the upper mandible to do X verb.
That means they're doing that verb with a level of certainty.
If they're using their lower mandible to do X verb, then
they're doing it with a certain level of uncertainty.
And so we did we we focused on the Elites.
Okay, but you didn't really seem to be doing
like too much like phonologically different.
Where was that anything?
Concerning in terms of the different structures that the species have?
So the phonology and the initial sort of set
of phonemes that we started to work with was based on the producers preferences.
David and I sat down and we made some nonce phrase.
They didn't mean anything but we made them with varying levels
of alienness I guess would be the term that you know, the
most alien being the hardest for a human to produce and not
have to drink a glass of water right after and then the you
know, the least least alien sounding sounding almost like
Japanese right sounding like made up Japanese almost so that
I think there were like five or six different levels, maybe
more and then they chose one of those levels and said that's
where we want it and it was almost dead middle dead center of those choices.
And so the phonological choices were pretty much directed by
the producers and showrunners
based on the level of alienness that they wanted it to sound like
Yeah, so we talked a little bit about the sound let's actually
hear it and then also speaking of Makee like our introduction
of the language is her speak to the language is her speaking
to one of the council members. You hear a little bit in the
first battle of Elites saying specific words, but it's like
heavily modulated voices, but here you actually get a pretty
significant conversation.
Jan mosik'weya.
Ch'intan ch'adomo o -Ghashank'o zhi tkhaacho- tkha t'iyaq'ujen. K'e me mos ba.
Okay.
So there they're talking about.
This this artifact on on this planet and what happened to
it and there's there's a few different but you're right.
This the actress playing Makee is actually very talented in
in the language and you can I believe her backstory is like
she was raised mostly she spent most of her life with the Covenant, right?
That's my yeah, that's my understanding as well.
And she's kind of half half raised by them, but also very
human, but I don't know like some of the some of the lore escapes me.
I've watched the show, but I it's kind of
sometimes difficult to read between the lines.
I think yeah.
Yeah.
I I don't want to like spoil too much about.
- Sure, no, I get it. - Stuff that happens as you go into the show.
It was interesting to see that and also there is I
noticed that apparently there's a word for Spartan.
Which if people don't know halo the Spartans are like super
soldier Space Marines and the main character of
the games Master Chief is one of the Spartans.
He's been like genetically enhanced and he wears power armor
and he's a giant dude who can handle giant weapons and and
stuff like that, but like they have a word for Spartan and
then they they have a word that mean that's being translated as "demon".
Is that like a derogatory term for Spartans or is it
specifically directed toward Master Chief or what?
My understanding is when we made the word we were it was
if I remember correctly the script just wanted us to refer
to him as "Demon" and it was initially directed at Master Chief individually.
That word is Ghashank'o and it just means demon and then the
word that refers to humans, domo, and that is
pretty important because it goes back to the game.
So one of the things one of the requests when we were first
developing this was to keep as much of the game conversation
or or lingo as we could and so one of the
interesting things is the verb to go in the game.
You'll hear the Elites chant "Wart wart wart" so we made the
verb "to go" warut'o that and so so that when they're speaking
quickly, it sounds like they're saying "wart". Warut'a warut'a.
But it keeps with the with the phonology that we created as
well without being too far outside the lines there and then don't know.
We just made domo mean human because that's in the game as well.
Okay.
Yeah, where did the Sangheili come from?
Is that in the game or they just called Covenant in the game?
You know, I never actually played the game.
My son did my son played multiple iterations of it.
I can't really say I think it comes from the game lore,
but it's it's just Greek or Greek or Latin.
It means blood blood sun, so...
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Sanghelios, you know.
Oh, okay.
That's that's interesting.
And I know that there I know that there are some like biblical
references in the in the game and stuff that surround
the Covenant and and and stuff like that.
One thing I noted what I was watching and I want to know if
like it factored into the design process at all was
that there are multiple human languages. In season one,
we get significant Korean and Hungarian dialogue.
Right, I noticed that myself.
Yeah, and then season two.
There's a little bit of Spanish.
Was there a conversation about like what human languages would
be represented and trying to make sure that Sangheili would
be different from those and distinguishable or?
I can't say that I was part of those conversations what I what I can
say is whenever I reviewed a script because one of the things
that I was doing is I was taking the pieces of the script that
belonged to us that we were supposed to translate and putting
them together so that we would have a working document.
I didn't see anything that was written out in Hungarian or Korean.
My guess is what they did is they wrote the entire
script in English and then they would just point to the actor
or actress that was supposed to speak those lines in those
languages and say this is for you to speak in Korean or what have you.
But again, I wasn't part.
I wasn't privy to that.
I don't think I don't think it really reflects that much because
none of the languages spoken had, you know, the the ejectives.
Yeah.
That's one thing is like you had ejectives in Sangheili which
definitely contrasted with you didn't end up having any human
languages that have ejectives in there, but you now.
It might the series might go on.
So who knows? (laugh)
No, you're right.
No, the closest thing grammatically would be I guess the Hungarian
based on you know, it being agglutinative much
like Sangheili is with the verbal structure.
Because our verbs can get quite long.
So I think that's probably the only comparative point.
I would say.
Yeah, but it wasn't it wasn't really a factor.
No, not much.
You were just translating the Sangheili lines.
So they they kind of selected what the phonology would be.
Yeah, based on based on a set of parameters that David and
I worked out because the one of the guidelines they gave us is
they wanted the overall structure of the words to be Japanese
like, you know, the sort of the open syllable situation with
very few codas involved and we even though we included three
codas /ɪn/ /əŋ/ and /əs/ we didn't utilize them that much.
We we kind of veered away from them because they wanted this
open syllable type and I think the I please don't quote me on
this because I could be misremembering but I think the original
company that owned the game and developed the game was in fact Japanese company.
And that's one of the that was one of the reasons behind it.
Also during my research because I was tasked with researching
a lot of the lore of the video games and some of
the background behind where does "domo" come from?
Where does "wart" come from all that stuff?
I found out and this is very interesting that in the original video games.
I think the first two or first three maybe the the speaking
that you hear from the Elites is actually
Japanese recorded played backwards and sped up.
Wow.
Yeah, so a little bit of trivia for everybody on those games.
The original language you hear is in fact Japanese reversed
and sped up and so they kind of wanted us to sort of go that
route and so we gave them like I told you a minute ago the
alienness factor increased but with a sort of a Japanese structure involved.
Yeah.
Well, it definitely doesn't sound like Japanese anymore.
No and part of that part of that was a little bit of David and a little bit of me.
I don't think David would be I don't think he would avoid answering this question.
The process was a lot of go look at the script see what we
need to do and then make us a bank of words to choose from
that we can if we don't have the definition yet go make some
words that fit the phonology that we might implement for
those those meanings and those definitions and so I wouldn't
say I went out of my way to avoid the Japaneseness, but I
definitely made a point in some of the selections to veer away
from the Japaneseness because when you put the words together and
you make your sentences and you're making sure your syntax
goes well together, you know, you can kind of reverse
engineer it and go back and maybe change one of the lexemes
or morphemes so that it doesn't end up sounding
exactly like Japanese.
Right, right, right, right.
So you're you are into scripts.
I don't think I saw any Sanghaili writing.
Did you did you guys develop any writing?
So there's there is stuff in the game and it's it's kind of
an elementary system, and aesthetically it's pleasing, but
I don't know that it really functions very well for the
language we created. In the early stages of our project working on this,
I did put together a proposal. David liked it.
He made a secondary version that he thought would work well
as a font and we proposed it and they sort of said thank you, but no, thank you.
We're going to leave it to the art department, which I'm sure
you're aware is not uncommon on TV shows and movies.
They leave the aesthetic design to the art team, which you
know can make for a really pleasing movie or TV show, but
doesn't necessarily speak to the stuff that you and I might be interested in.
You know, how does the writing system work?
Etc.
My proposal is is left on the cutting room floor.
So to speak.
But I did I went full-fledged with it and I had it all worked
out this going to be sort of a Tibetan esque the way the syllables fit together.
It was going to be abugida, but you know, if
they they chose not to go with it, that's fine.
I think this seems to be a common thing in like the movie
conlangs is that like sometimes they will ask somebody to
make a script or they will accept somebody's script they
made and then but in a lot of times they just like send it
to the art department and the art department does like an
alphabet cipher and it just doesn't have the systematicity to it.
No, and I think I think some of it is budget.
I think some of it is, you know, they're prioritizing the
story over the aesthetics and I think some of it and this
is just my opinion is they're not sure how these things
really work and they don't they don't they don't think it matters and that's fine.
That's their choice.
I think it would have been cool.
I also, you know, I like a like you I've watched the show
and I don't know where they would have necessarily included
it. So I kind of think it might have been a necessity thing in this case.
It may have been what we don't really need it.
So we're not worried about it, which again, that's
their choice, but I was fully on board to do it.
David David and I both looked it over and we thought about
you know, what what level of effort would be involved and
I probably would have spent about a week or two on it and
then he could have turned it into a font probably another
week or two, but they wanted us to focus on the language.
That's what we did.
Yeah, but that is interesting.
Yeah, it would it I think given I don't think I have that
we have any shots of Sengheili writing anywhere which you
know, I mean they could have had a close-up of an interface
somewhere that they could have put it on but I guess they just didn't worry about it.
Yeah, like I said, I don't think it's a priority for them.
I think this show is very much focused on the story and
the action. The Sangheili that we've created thus far.
I think has added some depth to the story and
I think that's what they were looking for.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's it is an interesting story.
It's got lots of interesting characters and lots of you
know, complicated political shenanigans going on.
Yes shenanigans.
I think is the most appropriate word.
Maybe a little bit
stronger than shenanigans, but I won't get into all of the
stuff especially as you get into season 2 it gets a little
crazy but like it definitely fits in and I think it was very
important to have that with the with a human character being
involved who was like partially raised by the Covenant because
there was a little bit of interplay of her speaking different
languages and there was like moments where like she was
instrumental in in deciphering things and then there was
also-- I really like there was one moment in the show where
they had the Spartans start contributing to like deciphering
Sangheili because like a plot point in the first season is
that they don't understand everything and they're trying to
like learn more Sangheili in order to translate transmissions
and things and like apparently no one thought to ask the Spartans
because they're they're just weapons, right?
They aren't supposed to question anything.
They're not supposed to know anything.
They're conditioned and like chemically.
Prevented from like having feelings and things and also right.
They didn't think of them as intelligent.
But they had the most contact with Covenant because
apparently they never had any prisoners or anything.
So like they were instrumental in some of the efforts to translate it.
That was interesting.
Let's let's pivot over and talk a little bit about your other
like conlang work. Like what like what languages do you work
on personally and and do you have any other commercial work that you've done?
Well, so my personal stuff, I'll go over that first.
My primary project is one called Kala.
It is a artistic language that I developed primarily as a
means of exercising my writing system muscles.
It's a pretty basic language.
I'd say grammatically.
It's very close to it doesn't mirror exactly but
it's close to Korean in its grammatical structure.
Phonologically, it's pretty close to the Nahuatl.
I used open syllable structure like Japanese, but I included
some prenasals like Bantu languages do so, but I've created
a multitude of systems for Kala going back to one that I
originally created for a different language in the early
2000s and I've developed those systems as I've gone along with the language.
Most recently, I published a PDF that describes a system called Omyatloko.
Omyatloko is a logo syllabary.
It includes logograms, ideograms, pictographs as well as a complementing syllabary.
Yep.
There's the grammar for Kala.
Yeah.
And we will link to this.
This is on Fiatlingua.
Yeah.
So that's my main project.
There's a, like I said, there's four or five different
writing systems that I've created based on Kala.
Omyatloko, the latest one, is also my proudest one.
Over a thousand logograms.
And again, the complementing syllabary to go with it.
It's very fun to write with.
It's also a great tool in trying to develop vocabulary
and work on grammar skills, things like that.
It's just a lot of fun to utilize and to mess with and to update.
Another project that I've worked on is something called Mal.
Mal is a little different.
Kind of sort of sourcing some of the vocabulary from Proto-Indo-European.
But I'm trying to develop the grammar and some of the
outlying morphological changes so that the language
ends up sounding almost Semitic or Afro-Asiatic.
Even though I'm using PIE sort of roots and vocabulary.
I don't have a lot of other personal projects.
I did recently start something called Hajimo,
which is something sort of in honor of my daughter.
It's a language for fairies.
It's got somewhat of a minimalistic phonology, but the
grammar is what I'm prouder of because it's
going to involve things like motional coverbs.
For example, a fairy is going to be flying around.
Are they eating while they're flying?
If so, are they flying quickly, flying slowly?
Are they hovering?
And those would be encoded in morphemes and in {unintelligible}.
So those are just some side projects.
I have done some other commercial work, nothing that's
advertised because I get contacted sometimes by email or
through Reddit and folks will ask me to make them a writing
system or to, you know, put together a small vocabulary.
A couple years ago, an individual contacted me via Twitter and wanted me to make
some symbols that they were going to use to represent the seasons.
I went back and forth with them for a little while
because they were going to just do four seasons.
I showed them that different cultures see seasons differently.
Maybe I can create you a couple more.
So I made those symbols for them.
Small fee.
I don't really like to advertise prices because
those are always negotiable as far as I'm concerned.
But if somebody wants me to.
You're here.
Oh, I'm here.
Okay.
It says reconnecting.
Sorry.
But I don't like to talk about prices, because those are always
negotiable as far as I'm
concerned, but no, I'm open to any commercial work.
I like I like working on projects.
It's a lot of fun to sort of dig into not just the language
aspect of it, but the cultural aspect of it.
Why is this grammatical feature here?
Why don't they use, you know, plosives or why
why do they have three vowels versus seven?
Those kinds of questions are very interesting to dig into
but no, my primary projects are Kala and Mal.
because those are the ones that interest me the most.
I did see I do pay attention to the Language Creation Society
job postings and I will apply to those from time to time,
but there's a few of them that I know some of my other
conlanging friends are probably more suited better suited
for just based on the nature of the project job.
So some of them I don't I don't really apply for.
You were talking about like you enjoy delving into the culture
- as well as - Ah, yes, because cultural aspects can very
much inform how language changes and how it evolves.
I spoke about this both during my Kopikon presentation
that was specifically about writing systems, but also during
the latest Language Creation Conference that was held via
YouTube and that's I think that's one of the reasons why David
David preferred me for this position for this particular project because
like I said in the earlier in the interview military background
and some of the verbs of the dialogue that we developed that
we needed to develop the show pretty much focused on military
sort of tactics or military verbiage that is used in the
show and I think I do think that my insight is valuable in
those instances and some of the warrior mindset
of the elites, especially came into play.
- I can't... - Were there, like...?
Go ahead.
Like, yeah, I'm just asking,
like were there particular metaphors that
they they they use that that come from that or
Well, we had an interview with the studio that they put out
as a promotional video where we discussed how to say hello
and it has to do with fighting, you know, "Fight well"
is there greeting is it's not it's not hello.
So that kind of mindset that kind of metaphorical thinking
or dialogue is one of the things that we talked about and
instead of headquarters, they talk about a nest because the
Sangheili Elites are lizard-like so lizards have a nest where they lay their eggs.
So that kind of metaphorical thinking was applied throughout
the dialogue to be created.
In terms of like the
the kind of dialogue you were talking about.
So you're talking about like there's there's military style
dialogue that that you had to do was are you talking about
like commands or are you talking about like cases?
Yeah.
So one of the verbs that we made was to flank which is a
military term that that has a lot to do with
like movements across the battlefield, right?
We talked about we have a verb that is to track
someone or to sort of, you know, track them down.
Those are the kinds of verbs that we had to come up with.
We came up with some nouns that were strictly military like
talking about the different types of weapons
talking about the different types of vehicles.
And when we did that, we wanted to pull those in a natural way.
So we kind of started with this sort of proto word in
our head as far as like, where's it going to come from?
But then we developed it into a more specific term that
similar to the way modern militaries use these terms.
Good example, guys in the army today, even still they call
it a truck, and we're going to go get the truck.
Well, it's not really a truck.
You know what I mean?
Not in a strictest sense, right?
So so we we kind of looked at it from that perspective.
We talked about a rifle.
You know, rifling is something that goes back to the early
days of gunpowdered weapons, but it didn't always mean a
rifle that you carry to shoot, shoot someone with.
So you kind of have to take yourself back into that kind of thinking.
Where did the modern military terms come from?
And how do we want to develop those in this language for
these people because of their culture, because of their
physiology, as you pointed out earlier, those,
those are all questions that we had to include.
And and the technology because like they don't have a rifle
with a barrel that has the corkscrew grooves in it, they
have plasma rifles and plasma swords and needler thingies.
You have to figure out how those were made and
what, what words would end up being used, right?
Right.
Um, another good example, not necessarily military lingo,
but something that we developed from the culture mindset
is, uh, the idea of an empty egg, you know, like, like I
mentioned, there's sort of lizard like creatures.
Um, and so to insult someone, you might call them an empty egg, right?
Um, those, those, those kinds of things, um, to, to stomp
on someone's nest, you know, it's kind of like, I'm going
to go mess them up, you know, to keep it family friendly.
Right.
Um, but that's the kind of mindset we had to put
ourselves into develop, uh, a lot of the dialogue.
Yeah.
It, it, it is, it is super fun to get into like the mindset
when you're doing something that's for something that's non-human.
That's something that I'm, I'm thinking of a lot when I'm
doing, uh, Ndăkaga because it's dragons, right.
And I have to think about like, um, okay.
I have, I have a word.
I, I, I'm, I have these words and I, I know how human languages
come up with these things, but I think about it from the point
of view of a giant creature that can fly and has
a breath weapon and, and is predatory and stuff.
And it's like, yeah, yeah.
All right.
And like just, just coming, just coming off the top of my head, they
have tails, which influence their balance and therefore their perspective.
So like, you know, you take that into account that can influence nouns.
Like does, does that noun have a tail?
It could be a noun classifier.
You know what I mean?
Very interesting thought experiments.
Yeah.
Um, I have done a little bit of stuff with that, but yeah.
But, um, uh, it is interesting.
Um, does your military background affect your other conlanging?
Obviously it's going to be useful for the kind of
world building that you need to do in, in Sangheili.
But like, did you encounter other cultures in
a way that informed your other conlanging or?
So that's probably, yeah.
So that's probably the best way to ask that question.
So thank you.
Um, so I was stationed in Germany for the entirety of
my military time, uh, but I was deployed to Croatia.
A place quite frankly, that I had not heard of before I got there.
Uh, cause I was very young and ill informed of the world.
Um, I also spent some time in Saudi Arabia.
Um, I then as a contractor, don't worry about what that means, but as a
civilian, not in the military, I went over to Qatar,
so I spent quite a bit of time in the middle East.
And I can say for sure that that has influenced my, my own work.
Um, I learned as a, I don't know about as much
Arabic as, as, as a person can learn in two years.
Um, I had many Arabic friends, Arabic speaking friends, folks that were
from Jordan, Lebanon, um, Palestinians, Egyptians, um, even a few Iraqis.
Um, so I got the whole gambit of dialects, uh, across the, uh, Arabic speaking world.
Um, that was very informative.
Both, uh, as someone interested in conlanging, but someone generally
interested in languages and how they actually
work rather than sort of the textbook stuff.
I don't know if you took anything in high school, but I took Spanish in
high school and I know I've spoken to people from
Mexico and Puerto Rico and Colombia and Venezuela.
And the Spanish in those textbooks is not Spanish that exists in the real world.
Um, and being in the middle East again, like I said, it's very, uh, eye
opening and it really informs one's perspective of how language actually
works in the real world day to day, uh, between native speakers.
Um, so that part of it has really, uh, informed a lot of my own private
conlanging, as well as some of the stuff that we did with Sangeili.
Uh, David is, uh, extremely intelligent when it comes to sound
changes and developing vocabulary from a proto form to a modern form, uh,
as well as sort of the semantic space that a definition will
exist in before it needs to change to a different thing.
Uh, he was very good at that.
And some of the stuff that I learned, uh, in the middle East and everything,
I sort of helped him with some of that too, because like you might use a
verb, uh, differently between dialects, but in those dialects individually
within those different dialects, that verb is
going to have a pretty narrow space, right?
Uh, cause they're going to just use a different word, but across the
dialects, it might be, it might be really kind of weirdly different.
Um, and that's kind of what we had to keep in mind with Sangheili is,
Do we, do we need to make another word or can we
just sort of use this word a little differently?
Right.
Um, and his, his degree in linguistics and my experience over in the
Middle East, I think helped to inform how far we went
or how close we stayed to those, those creations.
Um, that made me think, um, a little bit, cause you were talking
about dialects and such, um, is that did you make any effort to make
different dialects of Sangheili, especially since like, you know, I
would, I would kind of expect the Elites and the Grunts to talk a little
differently than the council members, but I don't, I don't know.
No, I, I agree with you.
I think that there would be some different pronunciations just based on their
physiology, physiology alone, as you mentioned in the beginning here.
- Um, yeah, right. - But also outlook.
Um, yeah, it's, it's, it wasn't something that we were tasked with.
I think, I think David probably would have been all
for it had it been something that we were asked to do.
Uh, but we weren't asked to do it.
Um, and similar to the writing system that I spoke of earlier, you know,
if, if, if, if it's not something they want us to do, I
mean, okay, then we'll just, we'll leave it to the side.
You know, I think that probably with a little bit of time and a little bit of
effort, I think that either I could, or David could
pretty, pretty smoothly make a dialect or two.
Um, but it's not something that, uh, we've been asked to do.
Um, actually I would ask though, like how much, how
much did like the like religious aspect of the culture?
How much did you take that into account in lots of metaphors and stuff?
Because like, it's not subtle that the Covenant are religious
fanatics and that is their motivation for pursuing the Halo.
Right, so some of the writing that, you know, is in the scripts and in the
shows, um, you know, we would receive the scripts and I would go through it
and see what parts that we were going to do.
If it's spoke in this sort of metaphorical way or, you know, they were
using analogies or they're sort of speaking poetically or something like
that, we would definitely take that into account, but
it wasn't something that we drilled down on too closely.
Um, if you listen to some of the council members when they speak, I don't want
to say it's one for one as far as metaphorical thinking or metaphorical
speaking, but it's pretty close to the way humans speak, right?
It's pretty close to the types of languages, maybe an evangelical would
use or even a, a, um, maybe any, any extremists from, from
a religious, uh, sect or, or divination or what have you.
Um, so we didn't really drill down too far on that stuff.
When, when we were looking at it, some of it was, um, how do I put it?
It's kind of bland.
So all we needed to do was make the language sound
good, I guess is probably the best way to say it.
That it is kind of generalized.
It's not entirely clear what they worship, except that they, they want
to, the, the something in their religion makes them want to find the Halo and
use it to eliminate all other life forms,
basically very unsubtle textbook, evil cult.
Right, it's sort of an apocalyptic cult a little bit.
I would say a dystopic kind of, you know, apocalyptic thing.
They want to blow everybody up.
And like I said, the language is pretty straightforward and not, not the Sangheili
language, but the way they speak about
it in the script is pretty straightforward.
It's not as metaphorical.
Um, but yeah, we, we did work on a couple of things.
I can't recall them right off the top of my head.
We started this stuff back in 2019.
Um, just a little bit of history there.
Uh, 2019, uh, summertime is when David, uh, reached out to
me and decided to, to, to bring me on board this project.
And because of COVID, um, we got the first scripts.
I want to say it was mid to late 2020,
but we didn't actually do a lot of the stuff until 21.
Um, and they kept pushing back the premiere date
for the show, which, you know, understandable.
They had production delays.
They had, uh, actors that were kind of doing
other things in between all that good stuff.
So we didn't actually get down and dirty until
probably 21, 22, somewhere in there, 20, 21, 2022.
And then by 2023, you know, it was ready to premiere and here we go and everything.
And now we're into the second season.
I mean, it's, it's been five years since we started.
So some of the stuff from the, from the early days, I can't even remember.
Yeah, I know.
I, it, I, I know that there's, there's certain things that stick out as like
things that they must have written into the script as like
religious language, like calling master chief a demon.
And also the word, I think it's Hirajo, uh, meaning blessed one.
Right.
And so that's, that's a, that's a good example because you
played that clip earlier where he refers to her as Hirajo.
Um, that's, that's probably a good one to explain.
So we, we had the, uh, agentive or a nominative nominative for a person, right.
To make the concept into a person referred to an individual.
And so we just took the verb, uh, to be holy,
um, hira and we just said, okay, hirajo.
And those endings for the nominative person, uh, vary based on the phonology
of the verb it's being attached to as any natural language would.
Um, and so when they refer to her as Hirajo,
it's not her name, it's sort of her title.
So that's probably the metaphorical thing thinking that they're doing.
They're referring to her as holy one.
And that that's pretty cut and dry.
You know, just put an affix on a verb.
There you go.
You've got to do work.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, you know, it's not really tied to like precisely what it means.
Maybe more of how they see her because like the term is referring to humans
that have a certain special ability that I won't, I won't talk about it.
But, uh, yeah, yeah.
So, um, uh, but yeah, that's, that it, that's all like super interesting.
And, uh, it's, it is interesting to like talk to people who are on these
projects about like how, how things came together.
Um, uh, like one thing I will say is like, I, I was watching, so I watched
the, the first season when it came out on YouTube and like,
it was very upfront with the Sangheili from the beginning.
And like, it was, it was interesting getting into the second season and
watching it and like, kept watching more episodes.
I'm like, I haven't heard any Sangheili for a while until, but later on, it
comes in because like the first part is very much
focusing on like the human side of the story, I guess.
Right.
And that's one of the things, um, you know, because I'm the one that
pulls the stuff from the script that we need to work on.
That's one of the things I noticed, excuse me, right away when we get sent
the scripts is how much work each episode is going to require David and I.
And when I got the scripts for the first couple episodes of the second
season, I messaged David and I, you know, so
it looks like we can take a few weeks off.
Um, but then as you noted, it kind of gets thick there towards the middle
of the second season with the Sangheili dialogue.
And, um, I messaged him and I said, all that time off we had is gone because
it's going to, this is going to take us a couple of days.
And sure enough, it did.
Um, like we, we had it down to a science with the first season.
We, we, we would have the script.
I would pull the information.
And once that was pulled, it would maybe take us an hour to two hours to
really go through and punch out all the dialogue that we needed.
Um, and that was partly because I had done some work prior to those sessions
of him and I sitting down where I would, excuse me, develop some potential
with it, vocabulary based on the needs of the script.
Um, when it came to that second season and that, you know, the middle towards
the middle of the second season there, um, I was pretty well convinced.
Yeah, we're going to need a couple of days.
We did.
We needed, I think, two full days, uh, not full days, two days, two sessions
that were a little longer than normal to get all the way through.
And that's, that's the fun part though, to me.
Right.
I mean, it's really, you really got to dig
deep and you really got to develop new words.
Okay.
Is this going to work grammatically?
You know, do we need a new ending here?
Do we have the right kind of conjugation going on?
Um, it can, it can get kind of hairy.
I say this a lot and I, I, I mentioned this on my
stream because I was doing some, some, uh, translation.
If you've done your work right on a conlang translation should be hard.
It should take, it should take effort to do it because if you've done it right,
and it's not like meant to be close to English at all, then you're going to
have to like rewrite parts of it to make it make sense.
Right?
No, I agree with you.
I totally agree with that.
And David and I, there were a couple of instances where we would be doing some
dialogue and we'd have to go back and say, you know what?
No, we have to, this one's, we got the right verb, but we conjugated it with
the wrong ending or we didn't, we didn't put it in the interrogative or something
to that effect, uh, when it should be based on the
way Sangheili works, not the way English works.
Right.
And in my own work, I've had to do that too.
Yeah.
You know, you go, you go through and you practice and you, you try different,
different phrases and you sort of, um, exercise those grammatical muscles, if
you will, and, uh, that's when you get better at it.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, it's a whole process.
And like, you know, sometimes you might have to break things up or rearrange
sentences and stuff and get in and, or use, do use different,
different kinds of words that they used in the original.
Huh.
Um, but anyway, that it's been really great talking to you.
Um, and I will link, I'm going to link to, you've got like several
Fiat Lingua articles too, uh, including a grammar and two different writing
systems that I'll link to and, um, Halo it's on Paramount Plus if you got
Paramount Plus. Warning, it is military sci-fi, so it is fairly gory, and so
Well I very much I appreciate being, uh, being on your show here, George.
Uh, I watch, I watch every week, not always live.
Sometimes I have to watch it later after you posted it, uh, based on my
own schedule, but, uh, it's a really good show and I appreciate very much being on.
Yeah.
Well, um, thank you.
And, um, before you go, is there anything else you would like to, um, to, uh, say
just any advice you'd like to give to all the conlangers out there?
Uh, never stop learning.
Um, if you, if you have questions, ask people, ask folks like George, myself,
David, uh, if we can respond, we will, and we'll give you as much help as we can.
Uh, that's the whole point of conlanging is to learn and to develop your skills.
Yeah.
Well, uh, with that, uh, I'm going to say thank you, Carl, for coming on.
Um, and, uh, and sharing with us a little bit about your work and happy conlanging.
Thank you so much for listening to, or watching Conlangery.
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But to thank all of them properly.
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Thank you.
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