Pierre Abbat, On 31/07/2012 15:38:
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 :)
I would bet they don't master the rules for terminator elidability. But nothing else springs to mind as something I'd expect to be unlearnable. One snag with the Kelly & Frances case is that they're learning it from an L2 speaker and hence are having to induce a grammar from a corpus of usage that is more errorful than is the norm.
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.
These sorts of features are too superficial and too likely to be due to cognitive--discoursal factors to be good candidates for hardwiredness. My suggestions for hardwired linguistic features & constraints: (1) No discontinuous constituency [Lojban conforms] (2) Subject--Predicate relation [debatable whether Lojban conforms or violates] (3) Probable maximum limit of 1 object per phrase [Lojban violates] (4) Some constraints on long-distance movement (but I don't know which) [Lojban conforms by virtue of having no grammar of long-distance dependencies] --And. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.