Return-Path: Message-Id: <9205181716.AA17259@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Mon May 18 13:41:47 1992 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: response to Edmund G-E. X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Mon May 18 13:41:47 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN 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