Re: Twin speak

On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> Sally Caves wrote:
>
> >"SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY" wrote:
> >
> >> I've only met a couple conlangers in
> >> person: Matt, my younger brother (also Matt), Vicky, and Tim. Oh, and a
> >> pair of twins that my mother used to teach -- I'm not sure if you can
> >> count that as a conlang, because it is something that they just
> >> spontaneously did while learning to talk. (They're only six or seven
> right
> >> now.)
> >
> >This is called "idioglossia," and has been referred to in popular
> >parlance as "twin speak."  It's very interesting that your
> >mother ran across such twins.  How developed was their language?
>
> I wonder how common this is??  I recall that my twin nephews had a private
[snip]

I wish I knew, too.  :-)  There was a phase during which my younger
sister (by 2.5 years) was speaking some mixture of Korean and English and
I was the only one who could consistently understand her, though I was
Korean-ing and English-ing at her myself.  I was about 8 at the time,
though, so I don't recall details, and we're certainly not twins (though
we're very close, and people listening in on certain of our conversations
have no clue what's going on, what with all the idiosyncratic non-obvious
terminology like "lemonade," "Blueflame principle," "elthki," etc.).

YHL