[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban-beginners Digest V6 #30

[Carl Lumma <carl@lumma.org>]

>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.

An acquaintance speaks English to his daughter, and his wife French.
The daughter is learning both, even though his wife also speaks
English fluently (French was her first language, though).

>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'm from an area which was German-speaking a century
ago ("Pennsylvania Dutch" is actually unintelligible to modern
Germans).  It's now a dying language.  A lot of my friends had
grandparents who still spoke it.  But there was a conscious
effort on the part of those grandparents to bring up their
children as English speakers.

-Carl