terminators and bilingualism

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

I stand corrected on "yinwei/suoyi" - I only studied Chinese for a year,
and that was 16 years ago!  As for postpositional languages, I'm not sure
whether a postposition counts as a terminator or not.  It certainly would
if it marked, say, the end of a relative clause, but I'm not so sure about
simple case markers.  A language which used pre- and post-positions at the
same time would certainly qualify, though.  The problem is that as far as I
can see, whenever a language has a grammatical word before and after a
phrase, one of the pair is nearly always elidable.  The problem with Lojban
is that elision is not always an option.  However, there may be an argument
that terminators exist in  Universal Grammar (if UG actually exists, that
is), since it is common to express them, not only by punctuation, but by
pauses in speech (now there's a research area for someone).

As for children learning Lojban, there is no need to lock them up in a
cellar!  Bilingualism is very common in children of mixed marriages, and
while they sometimes mix up lexis, they always seem to follow the
grammatical rules of whichever language they are speaking at the time.  An
example from a Turkish/English household:-

(English) Parent: Bak! [Turkish imperative "look"]
4-year-old child: I'm backing, I'm backing!

The problem would be finding a Lojbanist rirni who could be bothered to
spend enough time speaking Lojban to their cifnu!

Robin