My understanding of the belter language was it was partly driven by the necessity to communicate in a vacuum so gestures were also important. Does that feature in the linguistics at all, or is it purely supplemental?
Again, I haven't actually read the books or seen the show, so I'm a poor reference, just wa paxoniseki unte wa beltawala, an earthling stanning the language like an otaku.
I like what I've found online of the gestural language, and apparently it gets used far more in the show than lang belta itself (being much easier for anglophone audience and actors).
My impression is that it is normally a supplemental redundant channel (pair go with the outstretched arm, ya with a raised fist, kori or sensa with the hand on heart, tugut with the hand beaks, etc.) but an area I can easily imagine it would play a paralinguistic role is in telegraphing sarcasm: one might say something in english while gesturing the opposite[1][2]. IIRC Naomi does this to Martians at one point?
[1] I'd imagine spacesuit comms would often show talking heads, leaving the belter gestural language —which uses everything but the head, because helmets— with a clear channel for side messages to one's crew, in one's immediate presence, versus the ofisha comms reporting to management.
[2] having noticed the strong resemblance of "Oi, mush!" to "Ой, мужик!" I now wonder how coincidental the resemblance of "Guv'nor" to "говно" may be?
On a tangent: Quintilian has an interesting chapter on the use of gesture in rhetoric, and he denounces imitative gesture (and especially imitative voice) as being infra dig, while lauding more abstract gesture as a side channel to breadcrumb the separate parts of a speech and their various relations to the current line of argument.
> "It was for this reason that Demosthenes used to practise his delivery in front of a large mirror..." et seq
(On the importance of glances, when not hidden by a spacesuit helmet: the soviet equivalent of Sesame Street used puppets with mobile eyes, which I find very expressive indeed.)
Conway's Law probably applies. The linguist and the choreographer for the TV show are two separate people, so there probably won't be very much integration between language and gesture.
I like what I've found online of the gestural language, and apparently it gets used far more in the show than lang belta itself (being much easier for anglophone audience and actors).
My impression is that it is normally a supplemental redundant channel (pair go with the outstretched arm, ya with a raised fist, kori or sensa with the hand on heart, tugut with the hand beaks, etc.) but an area I can easily imagine it would play a paralinguistic role is in telegraphing sarcasm: one might say something in english while gesturing the opposite[1][2]. IIRC Naomi does this to Martians at one point?
[1] I'd imagine spacesuit comms would often show talking heads, leaving the belter gestural language —which uses everything but the head, because helmets— with a clear channel for side messages to one's crew, in one's immediate presence, versus the ofisha comms reporting to management.
[2] having noticed the strong resemblance of "Oi, mush!" to "Ой, мужик!" I now wonder how coincidental the resemblance of "Guv'nor" to "говно" may be?
Edit: found a thread, https://www.reddit.com/r/LangBelta/comments/5w3puf/gestures/