response to Edmund G-E.

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!lojbab>]

The exact number of native speakers of esperanto is apparently not that fully
documented.  All references I've seen have been anecdotal.  I do agree that t
there are some.  The linguists who do not consider these numbers to be
significant note that these children are almost certainly brought up bi-lingual
or even multi-lingual, and learn the regional language as well as Esperanto, a
and indeed it is that regional language that they continue to use and grow in
because that is the language of the community.  In short the argument is that
Esperanto use is rarely of the communal intensity of natural language use -
where a speaker uses solely Esperanto in all aspects of life from first learning
the language to adulthood and thereafter, because it is the language of no true
living community.  I don't necessarily subscribe to this belief - I don't know
enough sociolinguistics to know what would be relevant.  But it does seem
that arguments can be made that the use of Esperanto by native speaking
children is not subject to the same processes, stresses, and influences as
those speaking majority langauges - the same could be said of other small
population languages as well, and the artificiality of the language should not
be the issue.

As to what linguists 'totemize' native speakers - the vast majority do.  The
essence of Chomskyan linguistics is that the critical question of linguistics
is how children acquire language so quickly, with such regularity and
consistency at very young ages.  The claim is that there are innate features
of languages and of language learning that are most evidenced in the very
young.  There is very little interest among theoretical linguists in second
language acquisition, because the process takes place after the so-called
critical period, and there is definitely a change in the nature, and possibly
the rate, of language acquisition after that point.  Non-Chomskyan linguists
will tend to depart from this dogma to some degree, but only those linguists
working on teaching second languages will tend to be interested in non-native
speakers and their usages.  The essential argument is that no non-native speaker
can possibly know a language as accurately and intuitively as a native speaker.
This is certainly a reasonable supposition, e3specially for the phenomena
being studied by most linguists.  (Hope you weren't about to spend a lot of
money on linguistics books %^)

Bilingual speakers, if bilingual from the critical language period, are
generally considered native speakers, though some may be concerned about
cross-over phenomena between the two languages.

Ideally both Lojban and Esperanto are identical between written and spoken use.
But to linguists they are still not the same thing.  First, the process
involved in reading and writing may be different in reading/writing than in
speaking.  Second, there are major stylistic differences in written language as
compared with spoken language.  This affect Lojban, and I'm sure it similarly
affects Esperanto.  Since we read and write at much lower speeds than we talk
and listen, the types of errors made tend to be different (even fluent speakers
make occasional errors), and we are prone to use more complex structures in
written language than we tend to do in spoken language.  These types of
traits should be the same even in a phonemically-spelled language.  And of
course, there are simply the different media invlolved.  Some have questioned
whether Lojban has sufficient redundancy as a spoken language - if you miss a
sound, or mishear one, you might get unparsable garbage.  In written language,
you can always go back and reread, and there is no questiona that Lojban has
sufficient redundancy for such usage.

lojbab