Creoles have some common grammatical features, like preposed negation and simplified morphology. This will first require a discussion of what creole languages are, as well as their key characteristics. 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]. This means that people in-universe are aware of the language as a marker of Belter identity. Earth and Mars have a financial interest in the colonies in the Belt, and Belters typically work for companies owned by Inners. These languages developed among fluent bilinguals. 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). McWhorter gives an example from Sranan Creole English, spoken in Suriname (5), which includes multiple creole features: the hunter NEG PAST PROG buy a house give me, “The hunter was not buying a house for me.”. Do you want to learn it? 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. Belters use the standard language when they have to talk to people not from the Belt, and belta to communicate with the in-group. During humanity's expansion into the solar system, people from many different parts of Earth or Mars would often have to live and work together, and they developed a pidgin language so that they could communicate with one another. Seth Macfarlane's From the guys who made family guy +18 only. So, beratna: What are your thoughts on belta? The resulting Belter creole is a crazy mix of English, Chinese, romance languages like French, German, Persian, Hebrew, Zulu, and a few other surprises. 52:30. 0:07 Miller is from the Belt, and he and the witness speak together in belta. Ars Talks with the Creator of 'The Expanse' Belter Creole Language. 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. 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. da Milafor "Miller". It’s quite a percussive and catchy language, and on set many of us began tossing around Belter words and phrases in our daily speak. The indefinite article is wa: The definite article is da: Definite articles are used before a person's name in some cases, e.g. TheBakeMyster. 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. Belter displays definiteness agreement, similar to that found in Greek or Hebrew. Within a creole, there is an acrolect, which is most similar to the lexifier, a basilect, which is most different from the lexifier, and a mesolect, which is in-between. 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.”. These are not specifically tied to creoles; these are factors that we all use every day when we speak, write, listen, and read. 6. Ars talks with the creator of "The Expanse" Belter Creole language. Any time plot-critical information is given, it’s in English. This is a (possibly incomplete) chart of pronouns, pro-adverbs and determiners, arranged in a convenient table-of-correlatives format. Viewed 3k times. It’s easy to notice examples of verbal simplification. The narrators explicitly mention social aspects of belta multiple times. I took a class in contact linguistics, where we covered the basics of pidgins and creoles, among other things, and in preparation for this essay, I read John McWhorter’s The Creole Debate (2018). If they’re trying to talk to a boss, English makes more sense. 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.”. See list of Belter Creole individual articles for a multi-column list of all words in this category. Naomi and Miller explain to the three Inners in the room that people and society are different in the Belt. Think of how a Belter would say “Jo-burg” as in Johannesburg. English isn't my first language and with the added slang of Belter it makes it frustrating to follow what they are talking about. Belters like Naomi can make use of their bilingualism and code switch to show solidarity, which Naomi is also shown to do in the TV adaptation (season 2, episode 6, around 35 minutes in). Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. 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. In relation to plantation creoles, for example, the Feature Pool Hypothesis suggests that, as multiple waves of slaves were brought to the Americas, they learned a non-native version of the languages, which approaches equilibrium over time. 4. The Expanse Wiki is a FANDOM TV Community. 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. The Belters consider Earth and Mars to be equally bad and refer to them as the Inners. There is also one or more substrates, the minority language which has an effect on the superstrate. I also noted some examples from the first two seasons of the TV adaptation. [1] The exception is pronouns, which do have distinct plural forms (see Pronouns below). 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. The you-form of verbs would be pretty frequently used in this kind of situation, and it’s plausible that this would be the most salient, noticeable form for learners, which they then would pick up and use as the only verb form. In creoles, this often takes the form of generalizing the infinitive. Inflection is the changing of a word form to mark person, number, gender, case, etc. Any sentence can be turned into a yes–no question by ending it with the interrogative particle ke: The related tag question keyá also makes a sentence into a yes–no question, but one which expects agreement: Sentences containing the ke-based interrogative words kemang, kepelésh, ketim, keting, or kewe do not need the trailing ke. Tense, mood, and aspect are simplified in comparison to the lexifier and substrate languages. For our purposes, the rest of this article assumes that the CE hypothesis is correct. A really cool but rare result of language contact is a mixed language. Is there any consistency to when certain languages' loan words are used in the Belter language, or even just a list somewhere … Rather than I/me, or he/him, you find ‘me’ or ‘him’ extended to all cases: think Harry Belafonte, “daylight come and me wan’ go home.”. (Sociolinguistics is the fun part: it’s the “why do people do the thing?” and “what does it mean when they do the thing?” Many of my friends and colleagues prefer formal linguistics, which is cool I guess, and someone has to study phonetics and morphology and syntax, and I’m glad it’s not me.). that of the people in power). To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. Verbal inflection is minimized. 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. Category:Belter phrases; This is a very large category! Machine translation could potentially limit the need for a pidgin to form, but machine translation is only as good as its programming. The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) is a very loose collection of factions who want the Belt to be independent from the Inners, each with its own preferred methods of getting there and vision of what an independent Belt would look like. Asked 2 years, 11 months ago. Both of the inner planets use the Belt as a source of resources, in an extractive economy. Belter displays definiteness agreement, similar to that found in Greek or Hebrew. 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. 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. List of words in the Belter Creole language (TV-version). 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. I think it's ordinary human behavior to switch between languages in order to be better understood by the people you're talking to. Farmer says he … She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke. 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. 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). This is exactly the type of situation where we’d expect a pidgin to develop, then eventually a creole. da Mila for "Miller". While getting interrogated on the martian ship "Donnager" (Season 1, Episode 3 "Remember the Cant"), Naomi shows this sign: Drummer doesn’t believe that Naomi is on her side, so Naomi answers her in the belta basilect. 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. Vasta used to host a 2015 blurb from the dialect coach, Eric Armstrong, where he talked about The Expanse gig, including some of the phonology that he was given from Nick Farmer, and how he adapted it for the Belter accent (s) for the series. Nouns may be used attributively to modify other nouns, forming a compound noun.