[lojban-beginners] Re: learning lojban

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Saturday 03 March 2007 00:56, Alex Martini wrote:
> It would certainly be interesting, but if it'd actually work or no
> I'd be hard pressed to say. See, we tend to think of children and
> babies learning language easily when it's actually quite a bit of
> effort. And they're not inclined to just pick up a language unless
> there's a strong driving force to know it.
>
> Your first language you learned because it was so useful. And you
> learned the exceptions because you got made fun of when you were
> little and messed them up. But it took about 5 or 6 years to get that
> far -- 2 or 3 to pick up  the basics. And learning language took up a
> healthy chunk of your time.
>
> So the point is that you'd have to make it worth while for a baby to
> learn Lojban. I've heard at some point of a Klingon speaker who tried
> to only speak Klingon to his son (I may have genders swapped up here
> though). The son never picked much up because Dad kept having to drop
> to English for words like "table", and Dad would speak English anyhow.

Another question with any constructed language is whether the language fits 
the baby's expectation of what language is like. There are linguistic 
universals, which apparently describe the kinds of languages we can learn. 
Esperanto fits them well enough that children find it easier to learn than 
natlangs, but Klingon was designed to violate some of them. I ran through a 
list of them (which was difficult, as several of them mention adjectives and 
other things that don't exist in Lojban, at least as a distinct part of 
speech) and found only one clear violation: in "these three blue houses", if 
all three modifiers are on the same side of "houses", "three" is in the 
middle, but the Lojban is {ci vi blanu zdani}. So I think it should be fairly 
easy.

> Anyone with grandparents who don't speak much English hits on that
> same thing -- as a baby you didn't learn their language because it
> was just too much work and you didn't need it. Maybe you learned to
> understand them and hit a happy medium -- I know a couple folk who
> can understand their parents' and grandparents' first language but
> can't put together in it to save their life.

I was like that when I started attending a Hispanic church. My mother is from 
El Salvador and my father came from France. We concentrated on French as I 
was growing up, and I heard Spanish only on the telephone. I still 
occasionally stop in mid-sentence wondering "What's that verb form in 
Spanish? I know it in French", or use what would be the Spanish word if it 
were cognate to the French.

Pierre