Re: [lojban] Feasability of native speakers

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

On Sunday 29 July 2012 13:34:19 la vinsent. wrote:
> coi rodo,
>
>      If, one day, a lojban speaker decides that his child's first
> language will be lojban, would the child even be able to learn it
> properly?  Adults can learn lojban because they were taught the
> concepts within it that are not present in natural languages.  A child
> on the other hand learns language in a different way.  Based on
> listening to other speakers, the child can decipher the grammar,
> vocabulary, phonology, etc of a language.  However, this is
> probably(I'm not sure, though) because human languages all share
> common traits that are hardwired into our language centers.  What
> these hardwired linguistic features are, if they exist, is unknown.
> Even though we don't know what these traits are, I reckon that lojban
> probably breaks a few linguistic mental rules and thus cannot be
> acquired by individual without having learned a naturalistic
> language(this can include conlangs such as Esperanto) first.  I doubt
> that it could be the first language of anyone, but I, of course, could
> be mistaken. These are just my thoughts.

Go visit Kelly and Frances in a couple of years :)

A good idea what these hardwired linguistic features are can be gotten by 
comparing typologies of different languages around the world. There's a list 
of over a hundred features, with maps of where they're found, at wals.info. I 
once went down a list of linguistic universals, and while many of them were 
hard to apply (no inflections of verbs, no case affixes on nouns, adjectives 
do not exist, ...), the only clear violation I found was the order of 
demonstrative, number, and modifier when they're all on the same side of the 
word being modified. The normal order is "these three blue houses" or "houses 
blue three these" or "houses these three blue", that is, the number is 
between the demonstrative and the modifier. The Lojban order is "le ci vi 
blanu zdani", because "vi" is a spatial tense marker, a kind of word that 
does not exist in most languages.

Pierre

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