quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: It may be artificial, but it's modeled on real languages and has a pretty complex system of grammar, including a lot of concepts that are quite foreign to English speakers.
Which is why I compared it to Esperanto.
Typologically speaking, Esperanto is pretty similar to English. It's designed to be very easy for speakers of European languages, especially western European languages, to pick up. It's also highly regular, unlike most real languages. Klingon, on the other hand, is designed to be typologically dissimilar to most of the world's languages, and it includes a lot of irregularities.
Esperanto and Klingon may both be constructed languages modeled on real-world grammars, but they are radically different from each other. So I'm still not sure why you're grouping the two together and why the fact that they're artificial per se should have anything to do with their ability to give people a better understanding of how language works.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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I wonder if the Dad was inspired by Montaigne?
quote:The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus who couldn't speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin and they also were given strict orders to always speak to the boy in Latin or when he was in their presence. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him.
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I spoke with Lawrence Schoen, who is one of the foremost linguists of Klingon. He said that the boy in question is now 16 years old, and that he's a perfectly nice kid.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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My son is 18 months old, and so far we've spoken to him almost exclusively in Albanian. Seems to be working out so far.
Posts: 2804 | Registered: May 2003
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This reminds me of a Roald Dahl short story (I can't remember the title for the life of me) where a father teaches his kid the wrong words - salt for sugar, knife for fork and so on.
IIRC, it results in grisly end. Not uncommon for a Roald Dahl short story, really.
Posts: 4393 | Registered: Aug 2003
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*whew* I was insanely relieved to go to the article and find out that it was NOT someone I knew or had ever known!
I went to school with quite a few people who spoke Klingon and threatened to do things like this. One of them even changed his name to ilam.
On a side note, I always wondered what it would be like to teach my kids Latin as their native language. Unfortunately, I failed to learn Latin before my son was born. Oh well...
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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I had a chance to talk with our Assoc. Dean for Research. She said (as I expected) that while it probably wouldn't do any harm - being similar to being raised in a two language family except useless) - an experiment to do this would be unlikely to get approval from the research organizations that regulate such things. Most research on human subjects, especially children, consists of collecting data on what already is rather than altering conditions in ways that might have unforeseeable consequences.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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I was once a member of the Institutional review board that approved all human subjects research so I am very familiar with the criteria used. There is no way the review board on which I served would have approved this study. It violates way too many principles.
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