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Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:34:27 +0100
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Feasability of native speakers
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Pierre Abbat, On 31/07/2012 15:38:
> On Sunday 29 July 2012 13:34:19 la vinsent. wrote:
>> coi rodo,
>>
>>       If, one day, a lojban speaker decides that his child's first
>> language will be lojban, would the child even be able to learn it
>> properly?  Adults can learn lojban because they were taught the
>> concepts within it that are not present in natural languages.  A child
>> on the other hand learns language in a different way.  Based on
>> listening to other speakers, the child can decipher the grammar,
>> vocabulary, phonology, etc of a language.  However, this is
>> probably(I'm not sure, though) because human languages all share
>> common traits that are hardwired into our language centers.  What
>> these hardwired linguistic features are, if they exist, is unknown.
>> Even though we don't know what these traits are, I reckon that lojban
>> probably breaks a few linguistic mental rules and thus cannot be
>> acquired by individual without having learned a naturalistic
>> language(this can include conlangs such as Esperanto) first.  I doubt
>> that it could be the first language of anyone, but I, of course, could
>> be mistaken. These are just my thoughts.
>
> Go visit Kelly and Frances in a couple of years :)

I would bet they don't master the rules for terminator elidability. But nothing else springs to mind as something I'd expect to be unlearnable.

One snag with the Kelly & Frances case is that they're learning it from an L2 speaker and hence are having to induce a grammar from a corpus of usage that is more errorful than is the norm.

> A good idea what these hardwired linguistic features are can be gotten by
> comparing typologies of different languages around the world. There's a list
> of over a hundred features, with maps of where they're found, at wals.info. I
> once went down a list of linguistic universals, and while many of them were
> hard to apply (no inflections of verbs, no case affixes on nouns, adjectives
> do not exist, ...), the only clear violation I found was the order of
> demonstrative, number, and modifier when they're all on the same side of the
> word being modified. The normal order is "these three blue houses" or "houses
> blue three these" or "houses these three blue", that is, the number is
> between the demonstrative and the modifier. The Lojban order is "le ci vi
> blanu zdani", because "vi" is a spatial tense marker, a kind of word that
> does not exist in most languages.

These sorts of features are too superficial and too likely to be due to cognitive--discoursal factors to be good candidates for hardwiredness. My suggestions for hardwired linguistic features & constraints:
(1) No discontinuous constituency [Lojban conforms]
(2) Subject--Predicate relation [debatable whether Lojban conforms or violates]
(3) Probable maximum limit of 1 object per phrase [Lojban violates]
(4) Some constraints on long-distance movement (but I don't know which) [Lojban conforms by virtue of having no grammar of long-distance dependencies]

--And.

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