From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Sat Mar 6 23:00:21 2010 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Mon, 14 Dec 1992 14:14:45 -0500 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7641; Mon, 14 Dec 92 14:12:49 EST Received: from UGA.BITNET by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) with BSMTP id 4797; Mon, 14 Dec 92 14:07:42 EST Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 10:18:21 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: milestone in kids learning English X-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Mon Dec 14 05:18:21 1992 X-From-Space-Address: @uga.cc.uga.edu:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: I get to report a significant milestone in my kids learning English. Avgust has produced the first "productive" English sentence; i.e. he has for the first time combined elements of the language in their proper grammatical roles to create a sentence that he had not heard. Angela, although a yerar older, and with somewhat larger vocabulary, has not yet done so, though she once did a phrase substitution of this sort using a Russian word to substitute productively. The context was the song from the popular children's educational show "Barney", which starts off "I love you, you love me, ..." He had finally memorized this portion of the song and was repeating it at dinner, so I explained to him what it meant, giving the Russian equivalents: I love you, ya tebya lyublyu You love me, ty menya lyubish and pointing as I said the words so he knew the association of the pronouns with the people involved. I then repeated the pronouns with pointing, and then repoeated the pairs of sentences, but giving the Russian translation in the abnormal English matching order so he could see the word correspondences: I love you, ya lyublyu tebya You love me, ty lyubish menya Surprisingly, he repeated it once and then IMMEDIATELY said: I love Mama, ya tyublyu mamu Mama love(s) me, Mama lyubit menya (I'm not sure he put the 's' in, but he certainly had gotten the idea that sumti (subject/object arguments) in the relationship could be freely substituted.) It bodes weel for Lojban that this is the first productive usage he has learned, since the entire structure oof Lojban is built around ever more complex varieties of just such simple substitutions of values for the sumti of a relationship. lojbab