Wasn't it one of the earlier Halo novels that said when an Elite clicks its mandibles twice, it's the equivalent of a human shrug? I wish Halo focused as much on non-verbal communication as Mass Effect did. I remember they did all sorts of cool things with the Turian mandibles. Nihlus (sp?) had a whole shot focused on him in the beginning of ME1 where instead of reacting surprised to Sovereign's appearance, his mandibles just twitched once. I love stuff like that. I remember at one point I was keeping a record of every bit of alien and Spartan communication from the books, especially non-verbal stuff like that. But the authors themselves never focused on it enough or attempted to keep their additions consistent with what came before.

For example, Karen Traviss said that the Elites can't pronounce 'ps'. Which makes sense if you think about it. They have no lips to make a 'p' sounds with. But then we hear them talking clearly all the time in the games, and in Halo 4. So it's not a recent change, just kind of a one-time thing. Which is annoying.

This is why we need some fictional stuff out there focusing only on the Elites, in a format where everyone can witness it and remember it, rather than just these little comments in passing in books that a lot of these content creators will probably only read once. In my opinion, Spartan Ops is the closest we've ever come to an 'official' look at the Elite society, in that I felt it accurately represented their culture and language well. And that's disappointing. We can and should have better after this long.

I think I'm also just upset that the Elites seem to have a whole language yet we still don't have a Sangheili Dictionary from 343. :P Or that no one has bothered to translate it, for that matter...