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Comment by metabagel | Hacker News Reader

Odd that there is no mention of Belter Creole (lang belta). That seems to be the gold standard of a fictional language in movies and television.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole

Translator here:

https://lingojam.com/BelterTranslator

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Mi pensa it was rather under-used; there's tons of scenes with Beltalowda talking amongst each other in English rather than Belter. There's actually very few scenes where people talk Belter rather than English with a few Belter words mixed in.

There's obvious practical reasons for all of this, but I wouldn't call it a "gold standard".

Sa sa Ke!

Ya, at least there's enough there there (despite the paucity of canon) to communicate and be creative; eg https://sites.google.com/view/tinglangbelta/xom

  — Oh Stewardess, I speak Belter.
    He's in great pain and wants to know if you can help.
  — Tili natet 'ratna. Im gonya leta-kom *mediting
    detim im bek fo du to gut.

I believe Tolkien's languages remain the "gold standard", but I'm not sure if they're as productive for everyday chat and memes.

(I have heard that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda made a big mistake in not creating any swear words for Modern Hebrew, leading to a substantial overlap in comprehensible swearing between jewish and arabic communities in J'lem. That said, I understand "chinga tu madre ... cabrón" perfectly well, so probably any language communities in close contact will swear at each other perfectly comprehensibly whether they share a vocabulary or not)

I think it's probably the gold standard in terms of the language creation and use in television and movies. I think most, if not all, other television and movies used less of their fictional language than did The Expanse with lang belta. Lang belta permeated the show. Of course, they had to balance that with understandability, so they sprinkled lang belta. But, they sprinkled it everywhere.

I think the show struck a good balance for an English-speaking audience. We see Belters code-switch between "more Belter" with Belter-only crews to "more English" when they gather in groups with other factions or Inners. Public address systems we hear in the background are usually bilingual (Belter+English on stations, Chinese+English on Mars, etc). It feels multilingual without needing lots of subtitles.

They really implemented it so well into the show. Every character actually spoke it and not rehearsed the language like a lot of other shows and movies does.

Yeah, it was much better than when a screenwriter inserts 5 Spanish words they remember from school into a script.

Neither that, nor Klingon and the work Marc Okrand did on it.

The article is basically about Dune & Peterson, and the work he's done, especially for Dune. It's not too surprising they left off other popular conlangs.

The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those. So, I was surprised they left of lang belta, which is a pretty well developed fictional language, probably better than any of the examples from the article.

One thing I absolutely loved about the first Dune movie was the incorporation of secret hand signals (covert sign language) from the book. The use of secret hand signal conveys the gravity and peril of the world they live in.

> The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those.

Yes, but Petersen worked on that one too.

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