A Short Discussion

The alien speech, as heard in the human mind, contain distinctions between voiced and unvoiced sounds not easily detected by a listener not prepared for them; the uninitiated ear would treat them as whispered forms of voiced sounds. The following discussion describes the sounds, as far as is possible, in terms of the sounds of the languages of ancient Earth.

In this text, unfamiliar alien sounds are represented by a consonant with a following ‘h’, except for ‘ch’, ‘th’, ‘sh’ and ‘zh’, which stand for their common English forms, and ‘kh’, the Mexican ‘x’. Thus ‘lh’ is pronounced as a silent ‘l’, like the Welsh ‘ll’. The ‘nh’ and ‘rh’ are silent forms of ‘n’ and ‘r’. For a native speaker of English, the ‘lh’, ‘mh’, ‘nh’ and ‘rh’ sounds, in fact, can be best approximated by whispering the words ‘lime near’ and using the sounds heard in that phrase for the letters ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘r’, respectively. The ‘gh’ and ‘q’ sounds are like Arabic gutturals arising from tightening the back of the tongue against the back palate and throat. The ‘sh’ and ‘zh’ sounds are like the ‘s’ in ‘sugar’ and the ‘z’ in ‘azure’; ‘th’ is unvoiced as in ‘thing’.

The Zashinhalh apply different added shadings to their vocal spectrum, but the subtleties, based mostly on high-frequency colorations, are too many to elaborate here. The reader who just wants to read can say ‘Marthail’, ‘Fanlaothim’, ‘Droinfig’, ‘Anmar’ and so on, dropping the aitches wherever it is helpful.