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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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 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.

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.

Sa sa Ke!

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