From lojbab@GREBYN.COM Sun Aug 1 02:20:44 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sun, 1 Aug 1993 02:20:43 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7440; Sun, 01 Aug 93 02:19:27 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4941; Sun, 01 Aug 93 02:20:57 EDT Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1993 02:19:26 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: significant Lojban news! (???) X-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: <2DY65mjrmlG.A.4O.-00kLB@chain.digitalkingdom.org> I am pleased to report what may be a major milestone in Lojban and conlang history. My daughter Angela has clearly learned some significant design features of Lojban without being explicitly taught them, thereby displaying some signs of "native language learning" of Lojban. A reminder that Angela is 7 years old, a native Russian speaker who is learning but far from fluent in English after 10 months in the US. The mark of something happening started to show up about a week ago (a week after LogFest), I believe after we had a Monday night session. Angela and her brother Avgust had been showing occassional new interest in Lojban words for things since a week before LogFest, perhaps because we were using it a little more around the house. But this had been limited to "what is Lojban for x" for many nouns - something they had been doing for many months with no sign of ever actually learning the words. Sometime after Logfest, perhaps about a week ago, though, Angela started doing something different. In what we thought was a little bit 'teasing us', she started jabbering away in nonsense syllables several times immediately after Nora and I spoke a little bit in Lojban (usually so the kids wouldn't know what we were saying). When asked she said that she was "speaking Lojban" though of course there was no resemblence between the jabbering and the language. After several occurences of this happening perhaps every 2 or 3 days (generally a couple of times close together when it happened), I suddenly recalled that sometime during the first month after arriving in the US, Angela had started spouting just the same kind of nonsense syllables in apparent mockery of us, but at THAT time it was "English" she was speaking, and it foreshadowed a rather sudden increase in her rate of picking up English. The kids have both continued to do similar "jabbering" in English, especially when attempting to sing songs that they "know" but don't know the words of. Perhaps others can recall when they were kids or about other kids, spouting nonsense syllables when "singing along" - my kids have been doing this with most songs for the last year, since there are few songs that they actually know and understand what the words mean well enough to realize when what they are singing is correct and when it is nonsense (but they sure do love to sing - at full volume, of course %^). For example, "Jingle Bells" in the car today (they don't yet realize that you don't sing Xmas carols in July) went something like "Jingle Bells, possly spells, forty nine oh eight" with even less recognizable syllables afterwards, none of which sound like real words. Realizing this similarity to their English learning, I started listening more closely to see whether there were any Lojban words or anything else recognizable in her jabbering. Nothing familiar. Until yesterday evening. After a little of this nonsense game, I was cutting Angela some watermelon - a 'round' slice of it when she jabberingly pointed and said ".... cukla" where the cukla was the last 'word' in a string of syllables. It was so clear that both my wife and I noticed. But I was the one who noticed that she said an APPROPRIATE word since "cukla" means "round/circle/disk" and is exactly the word for what she was pointing at (my wife recognized the word, even though she didn't know what Angela was pointing at). More surprising is that I can't recall ever telling her that "cukla" meant, or using it significantly in conversation in a context where it would be obvious. I quickly told Angela that "cukla" was indeed the right word for what she was pointing at and meant "circle". She repeated it a couple of times later in the evening and thus may be on the way to learning her first content word of the language, given the sudden positive feedback. On the other hand, using a word in what may have been pure coincidence is NOT what really caught our attention. With the positive reinforcement of Nora and my complimenting and encouraging her on her using a Lojban word correctly, Angela kept jabbering in "Lojban" while eating her watermelon, and then in getting ready for bed. But I noticed one thing about the jabbering last evening - there were a lot of syllables clustered together in a way that it sounded like real words rather than randome miscellaneous syllables. I couldn't figure out why, except that I noticed a lot of consonant clusters. Nora noticed why when I mentioned it, though. Angela was speaking many many syllables in such a way that they resolved into words by the Lojban morphology system such that almost all of them would be gismu "roots" with CORRECT PENULTIMATE STRESS. That the stress was really penultimate and not random with us just splitting the words according to the Lojban rules was made evident by the ends of her "phrases/sentences" and occassional single or double words, all of which ended with penultimate stress. None of these words actually "meant" anything , but it was very clear that Angela has learned that all multisyllabic words of Lojban are pronounced with penultimate stress, and that she is thus speaking nonsense that has somewhat of a Lojban sound and rhythm to it WITHOUT OUR HAVING TAUGHT THIS TO HER (I wouldn't have the vaguest idea HOW to teach it, and certainly wouldn't start a 7 year old learning the language by pointing it out). I then noticed that not only were these "words" penultimately stressed, but they were almost all of CVCCV form if spelled in Lojban, and used only phonemes found in Lojban. Nora noticed one further restriction on this - she thought most of the words had a nasal in the consonant cluster: CVnCV or CVCnV. This is interesting because "n" is indeed the most common consonant in Lojban and is almost always found in the medial cluster. Ospace that we have actually used and this may be a little less striking - maybe I should statistically analyze what percentage of possible Lojban words with l/n/r in medial position are actually meaningful). Few of Angela's words had consonant clusters at the beginnings of words, but the few that I heard all starreasonable rhythm, correct penultimate stress, and a reasonable allocation of consonants from within the Lojban phoneme set to match actual frequencies in words, none of this having been taught to her, and with the other noteworthy feature of absolutely none of the "words" other than "cukla" being real Lojban words (a rate of non-success that struck me given the small size of the gismu space, though I've since though about the percentage of gismu space that we have actually used and this may be a little less striking - maybe I should statistically analyze what percentage of possible Lojban words with l/n/r in medial position are actually meaningful). Few of Angela's words had consonant clusters at the beginnings of words, but the few that I heard all started with permissible initial clusters, usually something+'r', again the most common initial cluster in the language. This may be less significant because 'Cr' is also one of the most common initial clusters in English, and at least once she used an "str..." initially (something like "streila", I think it was) which would not be found at the beginning of a Lojban gismu (though it would be valid in a Lojbanized name or borrowing). Much more rare than consonant pairs at the beginning of words were the occasional CV and CVV words - all unstressed - that sorted themselves out of the speech stream - I distinctly picked out "kei" once, for example. They were never glued onto the following "gismu", so she isn't making nonsense "lujvo" compounds. Since gismu predominate in our rare free Lojban conversation around the house, I wouldn't expect to hear many words that sounded like lujvo if she was picking up patterns from our speech. I don't know how much of what we were noticing was because we were attuned to listening for "Lojban" in here gibberish, and how much is real patterns. But her speech sure seemed decidedly non-random in the stress and clustering, so she has clearly picked something up. I will be attempting to get a tape of some of her talking in the next couple of days to see if it can be more dispassionately analyzed for phoneme content and 'word' structure. It might turn out that all of this was a figment of our imaginations. But it was sure exciting and inspiring when we were hearing it. lojbab