bilingualism

[John Hodges <jbhodges@USIT.NET>]

At 05:13 PM 11/1/97 +0200, Robin Turner wrote:

>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
>
Greetings, all- I put considerable thought into the question "Why Lojban?",
what uses might it have... One use that seemed to have the best prospects
for serious fluency was as a "private language" between a married couple. If
both were interested in Lojban as a hobby, they could practice speaking with
each other, gaining the kind of skills you don't get by email; any children
they had might then pick it up as a "native tongue", and (though hardly
"scientific") much might be learned from the family's experience.

(I have noticed that some fluently bilingual folk, immigrants and foreign
students, here in the U.S. where the great majority are monolingual
English-speakers, will use their other language for private conversation in
public places.)

I also considered the politics of Esperanto, the goal of a "universal second
language", ideally sponsored by all the world's governments. One major
source of resistance I saw was the fear that the second language would usurp
the first, as it would be spoken more widely and would therefore be more
useful; I thought perhaps this fear could be overcome if the sponsoring
governments made it AGAINST policy/law to teach it or speak it to anyone
under the age of (12, 14, 16, choose.) It would then NOT be a "language of
the home", it would be a language you learned in your first year of "Foreign
language" study in the schools. Children could/would learn any other
langage(s) in the home, but Esperanto would thus be prevented from ever
being anyone's first language.

That is, of course, speculation for a hypothetical case, not likely to apply
to Lojban ever. I concluded that Lojban was aimed at more specialized
niches. Linguistic research, Hobby mind-stretching and logic-study, possibly
(in the absence of a universal second tongue) an input-language for a
laptop/palmtop universal translator. (That is, speak or type lojban into the
box, get the local language out. Translations would likely be stiff and
clunky, but they would be semantically accurate.) Since the speculations
above do not apply to Lojban, we need have no hesitation about using it as a
"private language" for the home, even advertising it as such.


John B. Hodges, jbhodges@usit.net
Honesty will give you all the truth there is, and no more.