that of the people in power). Unlike in English, where the modifier typically precedes the word being modified, in lang Belta the head noun goes first and the one modifying it follows afterwards: Definite articles are used before a person's name in some cases, e.g. (They don’t consider Belters fully human.) What I learned about creoles in Contact Ling was that they are the result of a pidgin developing a full grammar and being acquired and spoken as a native language. Rather than inflections, it primarily uses separate words to build grammatical constructions, such as prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and the meaning of a sentence depends strongly on word order. Lewis’, A Small and Eclectic Herd of Recent Equine Delights, Thomason, Sarah and Terrence Kaufman. Plurality is determined in other ways: the presence of quantifiers, numerals, or simply inferred from context. If they’re holding a separatist rally to protest Earther rule, Belter is the order of the day. In Leviathan Wakes, chapter six, Detective Miller, a Belter who works for an Earth-based security company, is talking to a man who’s inciting a riot on Ceres. TheBakeMyster. I didn’t write every example of belta in my notes as I read, and the ones I took are primarily from the first two books. European languages are the most frequent lexifiers (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), and all of these languages use a form of ‘to be’ to link the subject with the predicate: The sky is blue. Ars Technica. Early on in the book, Miller and his partner are interviewing a witness to a crime. Ars talks with the creator of "The Expanse" Belter Creole language. The question remains as to whether modern tools like Google Translate or Duolingo would have an effect in this situation. I think it's ordinary human behavior to switch between languages in order to be better understood by the people you're talking to. That is, when a noun is marked with da, any attributive nouns or adjectives applied to that noun must also be so marked:[5], delowda(relative)/kelowda(interrogative): how many/how much. As a language teacher, I have to say I’m not fond of Duolingo’s pedagogical methods (other people have discussed the topic here and here), so I am skeptical of its utility in this kind of hypothetical situation. There are plenty of other linguistic worldbuilding features I didn’t cover in depth, like Inners’ slang and Belter body language, so please feel free to discuss those below as well! Drummer doesn’t believe that Naomi is on her side, so Naomi answers her in the belta basilect. Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. It's actually a mix of several Earth languages spoken by the original settlers in the Asteroid Belt colonies — very appropriate, as the Belt is a melting pot of several different races, customs and backgrounds. Viewed 3k times. English isn't my first language and with the added slang of Belter it makes it frustrating to follow what they are talking about. 6. Miller is from the Belt, and he and the witness speak together in belta. For our purposes, the rest of this article assumes that the CE hypothesis is correct. This is a pretty neat idea, and it goes along well with the Chomskyan/generativist trend in formal linguistics, but, according to McWhorter, there is no evidence at all whatsoever for this hypothesis. Creoles frequently omit the copula. Creoles have some common grammatical features, like preposed negation and simplified morphology. As The Expanse executive producer Daniel Abraham, who co-created the series under the pen name James S. A. Corey, explains, the Belters' accent was created by a professional linguist. Typologically, Belter is an analytic language. Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), © 2021 Macmillan | All stories, art, and posts are the copyright of their respective authors, Who Gets to Be People? Belters use the standard language when they have to talk to people not from the Belt, and belta to communicate with the in-group. I also noted some examples from the first two seasons of the TV adaptation. While getting interrogated on the martian ship "Donnager" (Season 1, Episode 3 "Remember the Cant"), Naomi shows this sign: Category:Belter phrases; This is a very large category! Generally, nouns are not inflected for number; a singular noun has the same form as a plural one. I know there is a site that teaches Belter but I don't need to know the entire language I just sort of need their top 10 most used words to get me through the Free Navy chapters. In the 1980s, Bickerton proposed the Bioprogram Hypothesis, based on Chomsky’s conception of Universal Grammar (that brains come inherently equipped with computer-like 1/0 settings for principles and parameters, which are set as the languages are acquired). Over time this developed into a full-fledged creole language, lang Belta, which became the lingua franca, a common ton… List of words in the Belter Creole language (TV-version). You they dog.” This demonstrates both copula deletion and loss of case distinctions (no possessive marking), as well as the verbing of the noun “kibble.”. Encountering the Alien in, Disruptions in Communication Disrupt Atevi Society in CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner Series, Five Books That Get Kinetic Weapons Very Wrong, Fairy Tale Sisters Who Don’t Hate Each Other, The Real Ghosts Were the Friends We Made Along the Way: Téa Obreht’s, Being a Superhero Is Super Hard in the Trailer for, Leia’s Bounty Hunter Disguise Brings My Favorite Fantasy Trope to a Galaxy Far, Far Away, Advertising for Burglars: Lord Dunsany’s “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”, Calling Evil Good, and Good Evil: Spiritual Abuse in C.S. This will first require a discussion of what creole languages are, as well as their key characteristics. Come by r/LangBelta and say oye. That is, when a noun is marked with da, any attributive nouns or adjectives applied to that no… Tense, mood, and aspect are simplified in comparison to the lexifier and substrate languages. I think you could call lang belta a (constructed) creole, because it hits many of the common features of a creole, and if similar conditions were mapped onto a real-world situation, the social aspects would be highly amenable to creole formation. For the TV adaptation, they recruited the linguist Nick Farmer to consult and develop the creole further (see the Ars Technica post linked above), and he put his linguistic skills to work imagining what curses and insults people would use in space and how body language would look. Lang belta shows some features of creoles, and, given what I’ve read about the size of the worldbuilding bible for this novel series, it’s likely they did the research (A+). The Expanse has already finished its first season (we liked it as much as Farmer's fans at Longitude last week), but don't fret if you missed all the Belter thus far. Together on the Roci, the crew and Miller are discussing the reasons that Protogen, the Earth-based company, believed that they could use Eros as a testing facility for their protomolecule. For standard English, we have ‘I go’ but ‘she goes.’ Generalizing the infinitive would be ‘she go.’ German has different inflectional forms, ‘ich gehe,’ ‘du gehst,’ ‘er geht,’ ‘wir gehen,’ ‘ihr geht,’ ‘sie gehen.’ Generalizing the infinitive would give ‘ich/du/er/wir/ihr/sie gehen.’, Case distinction is lost in lexifier pronouns. Other source languages include French (bien, dieu), Japanese (shikata ga nai), and Mandarin (dui ), along with other languages that I didn’t recognize because I don’t know them. Here are just a few of the Belter words and phrases that we've heard on … For a real-world, US-based example, we have Standard American English (what you learn in school) and African-American Vernacular English (which has its own separate rules). Verbal inflection … "Beratna" (brother) and "copeng" (friend) may also make a splash. However, it does use compounding and some suffixes for deriving new words. The Expanse Wiki is a FANDOM TV Community. Adjectives are placed after the nouns they modify: ere: at, on, about (locative preposition), Below are the words for basic numbers.[6]. Now for some definitions: Every creole has a lexifier, which provides the majority of vocabulary. Creoles frequently omit the copula. Diglossia occurs when two dialects or languages exist in the same space and are spoken within a language community. The two most easily identifiable (to me) non-English languages involved in lang belta appear to be German and Spanish, with que/ke, pendejo, agua, nichts, dir, and bist. His partner, from Earth, remarks that it’s “Belters keeping the Earther out,” but Miller corrects him: it’s poor folks keeping the educated guy out. Throughout the books, people say “bist bien,” which uses the German du-form (2nd person singular) of “to be” for all people and numbers, and “sabez nichts,” which also extends the 2nd person singular form of “to know.” Many creoles extend the infinitive form, but that doesn’t mean this one is impossible. It was a pretty cool idea at the time and would have done a lot to support the UG hypothesis, but, unfortunately, evidence contradicted this premise, as studies were published that showed that children who created creoles (in this case, Hawaiian Creole English) did not have insufficient input, because they spoke English at school and their parents’ languages at home (McWhorter 2). 1 Words and expressions 2 … I am a woman. He is a proponent of the pidgin-creole lifecycle hypothesis, which he refers to as Creole Exceptionalism, and I think he lays out an excellent case for his argument. The Belters consider Earth and Mars to be equally bad and refer to them as the Inners. You write a chat message to a friend differently than a quarterly report for your boss or a letter to your grandma. It’s easy to notice examples of verbal simplification. And so, when adapting the books into a TV show, linguist Nick Farmer and accent-coach Eric Armstrong worked together to develop the Belter language based on existing cultures. There is no break in transmission of the source languages. Is Belter Creole, from The Expanse, a full conlang or is it just phrases? Creoles emerge from language contact situations where people need to communicate with speakers of other languages. Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat. Earth and Mars have a very tentative alliance that could come crashing down at the least provocation. “Practically all of the Atlantic English-lexicon creoles, for instance, employ a Past tense derived from been, a Future derived from go, and a Terminative Perfect expressed by done” (Winford 324). Pidginization was not involved. Active 2 years, 4 months ago. The Expanse: The Belters' Language Is Excellent - Here's Why The Expanse is an ongoing novel series by James S.A. Corey (the collaborative pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck); currently at eight doorstop-sized volumes, it was adapted for TV by SyFy, cancelled, and rescued by Amazon Prime. As its English name suggests, Belter Creole is a creole language. This probably means Belter words like "Beltalowda," meaning "us Belters," will be heard on the new episodes. Earth and Mars have their own insults for each other and the Belters, but they speak similar standard languages, with some lexical variation akin to U.S. vs. British English. CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. Multiples of 10 or 100 are formed by appending teng or xanya to the combining form of the multiplier, with the stress remaining on the multiplier: Numbers with values in both the ones and tens place are composed in little-endian order, joined by un: If there is a hundreds place, it comes before the ones-and-tens place terms:[7], When used attributively, numbers come before the noun they count, as in English.[8]. The Feature Pool isn’t the first hypothesis to make use of generativist ideas. See also. Farmer says he … (So there aren’t spoilers for anything past the opening of book 3, Abaddon’s Gate.). There is also one or more substrates, the minority language which has an effect on the superstrate. Nouns may be used attributively to modify other nouns, forming a compound noun. You can choose to use a different dialect or a particular type of slang to show that you belong to a particular group (this is often called code-switching), either out of solidarity with your interlocutor or to reject your interlocutor’s familiarity and emphasize your difference. Inflection is the changing of a word form to mark person, number, gender, case, etc. So today, in creolist circles, the Bioprogram Hypothesis is basically disproven, but it provides a theoretical heritage, of sorts, to the Feature Pool. 4. A pidgin doesn’t have grammar per se, but it has very basic syntax. For example, the -lowda suffix is used to form plural pronouns (see below). Language forms a solid plinth for Belter identity, both uniting and alienating them at the same time. We link particular traits to accents, dialects, and slangs (among other things), and we choose, consciously or not, our own ways of writing or speaking depending on our audience. Sociolinguistically, lang belta functions as a typical language in a diglossic situation. Out in the Belt, though, people from a lot of different countries who spoke a lot of different languages came together to build colonies or mine asteroids or fly cargo ships. Is there any consistency to when certain languages' loan words are used in the Belter language, or even just a list somewhere … https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/708049355173834753, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/842449556117757952, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/840229898308399106, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/711739147791241216, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/707289345049231360, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/841759024869605377, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/841785504320315392, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/842582221340925952, List of Belter Creole individual articles, https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_grammar?oldid=62772. Naomi and Miller explain to the three Inners in the room that people and society are different in the Belt. In the book and TV series The Expanse inhabitants of the asteroid belt (Belters) speak a language called Belter Creole, a conlang designed by Nick Farmer which is intended to be the result of creolisation between most of the Earth's languages, including English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Romance languages, Hindi, Slavic, and Bantu. While English doesn’t have much verbal morphology, and the verb often looks like the infinitive, the Romance languages have extensive verbal inflection. Related: The Expanse's Book Time Jump Could End The Show Early Because Belters have roots in different nations, their language needed to reflect their multiculturalism. The two most well-known of these are Media Lengua, which combines a Spanish lexicon with Quechua phonology, morphology, and syntax, and Michif, which combines French nouns and nominal morphology with Cree verbs and verbal morphology. This is exactly the type of situation where we’d expect a pidgin to develop, then eventually a creole. The background pits three main factions against each other: Earth, Mars, and “the Belt,” which is everything past the asteroid belt. For the language from the TV show, see Belter Creole. Seth Macfarlane's From the guys who made family guy +18 only. Thanks for A2A! It’s an interesting question—apparently some people disagree with what I thought was a settled matter (again: not a creolist), as I learned from McWhorter’s book. me if I misstate something. This page deals with the grammar of Belter Creole, also known as lang Belta. According to this hypothesis, “creoles instantiate Universal Grammar with parameters unset, the ‘default’ of language, produced by children under the unusual circumstance of acquiring language with insufficient input” (McWhorter 1). There’s also a whole lot of English/ lang belta codeshifting on the fly. Miller even remarks, “We’ve practically got our own language now.” Amos, despite being from Baltimore, has spent twenty-five years on ships and has learned to understand Belter talk, which he demonstrates when Naomi breaks out with “tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido.” He translates this as “Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks.” A more literal translation might be “you run spinward, tube your way up and gone.”.