Message-ID: <345F80FA.59FE@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue, 04 Nov 1997 15:09:36 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: bilingualism References: <199711021500.KAA08736@locke.ccil.org> <345DF514.424F@locke.ccil.org> <345F66C7.71A1@eos.ncsu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 858 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Nov 04 15:09:36 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - Andrew Sieber wrote: > John Cowan wrote: > > Most Federal public schools for Indians banned the speaking of the > > children's native language for decades. > But there was no restriction on the language > spoken in the home, only the one spoken at school. Yes, this is bad, > but not nearly as bad as prohibiting children from even learning their > parents' native tongue. I forgot to mention that these were boarding schools, often located hundreds of miles from the reservations, so in effect the native languages *were* completely banned. The result is that many Indian children lost their native languages, and therefore so have their children --- a very few of whom are trying to relearn their "own" languages either from surviving elders or even from books. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban