I feel truly sorry for the poor kids. ? --? Gene
Apparently Robin L. Powell is bringing up his 2 twin girl children as first-language lojban speakers.? This is the first such experiment for lojban (it has been done for Esperanto many times)? and so far it seems to be working, I think they are nearing age 3.
--yah, is this child abuse? Well, certainly children are subjected to far worse all the time and in many cases it is claimed to be uplifting, not abuse. It would be interesting to know what the 1st-language esperanto kids (now many grown up) themselves think. I've never heard of any attempt to find out besides mere spotty anecdotal evidence. E.g. the most famous such Esperantan child was the many-billionaire George Soros. Another was Nobel laureate (medicine) Daniel Bovet. Judging by those two, it doesn't necessarily hurt them. Lojban is pretty unusual though. It is conceivable 1st-language lojban speakers will be "new kinds of thinkers" and be able easily to go mentally where normal people cannot. Also possible they'll end up mentally damaged. Soros: "It was a very useful language, because wherever you went, you found someone to speak with." But it seems Soros did not learn it as his first language, that was Hungarian. He did learn it from his father growing up. Also, at age 80, apparently Soros is no longer fluent in Esperanto. My grandfather (first language: Russian) actually was unable to converse in Russian in his old age, he'd literally forgotten his mother tongue after living 70 years in the USA. US census data on language use: http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf does not even mention Esperanto et al although perhaps their underlying data set includes info on it and many other languages which this report also does not mention(?).
"First language" only makes sense if one learns a second language after childhood. Kids who speak, say, Spanish at home and learn English in kindergarten are usually completely fluent by third grade (in the sense of thinking in English as easily as in Spanish). There's some delay in learning to read, but unless that's coupled with a learning disability, it ceases to be relevant by the end of elementary school, and even sooner if the parents are heavily involved in the kid's education. Anyone who makes the effort to teach their children lojban is plenty involved. Also, I'm pretty sure that the guy's wife speaks to the kids in English; dual-language households are common enough. (There's an anecdote about a guy who grew up in a family where the father spoke one language, his wife spoke another, and grandma spoke a third. When he was four, he asked when he was going to get his own language.) On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 9:48 AM, Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
I feel truly sorry for the poor kids. ? --? Gene
Apparently Robin L. Powell is bringing up his 2 twin girl children as first-language lojban speakers.? This is the first such experiment for lojban (it has been done for Esperanto many times)? and so far it seems to be working, I think they are nearing age 3.
--yah, is this child abuse? Well, certainly children are subjected to far worse all the time and in many cases it is claimed to be uplifting, not abuse. It would be interesting to know what the 1st-language esperanto kids (now many grown up) themselves think. I've never heard of any attempt to find out besides mere spotty anecdotal evidence. E.g. the most famous such Esperantan child was the many-billionaire George Soros. Another was Nobel laureate (medicine) Daniel Bovet. Judging by those two, it doesn't necessarily hurt them. Lojban is pretty unusual though. It is conceivable 1st-language lojban speakers will be "new kinds of thinkers" and be able easily to go mentally where normal people cannot. Also possible they'll end up mentally damaged.
Soros: "It was a very useful language, because wherever you went, you found someone to speak with." But it seems Soros did not learn it as his first language, that was Hungarian. He did learn it from his father growing up. Also, at age 80, apparently Soros is no longer fluent in Esperanto. My grandfather (first language: Russian) actually was unable to converse in Russian in his old age, he'd literally forgotten his mother tongue after living 70 years in the USA.
US census data on language use: http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf does not even mention Esperanto et al although perhaps their underlying data set includes info on it and many other languages which this report also does not mention(?).
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participants (2)
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Mike Stay -
Warren D Smith