Re: A DISTURBING proposal! (was Re: Personal langs and converse of aux)

Jörg Rhiemeier sikayal:

> >       2.)it's designed to be an
> > excellent "first" language for my kids.
>
> You are really going to do THAT???  Have your children grow up with a
> language that no-one else speaks outside their core family?  I consider
> this MONSTROUSLY unadvisable, as it might result in SEVERE mental
> development disorders.  (I am not a pyschologist, but common sense alone
> tells me that this cannot be good for your children.)
Au contraire (sp?).  Children are very good at learning multiple languages
if they're exposed to them all in early childhood, and under these
circumstances the children would almost certainly grow up natively
biligual.  Native bilingualism is a wonderful thing, and having one of the
langs be unique to your family wouldn't hurt anyone.  It wouldn't actually
be much different than families that speak minority langs at home here in
America, like the Vietnamese family I knew in high school.  They were the
only Vietnamese-speaking people in our area, and I doubt that the children
ever knew other Vietnamese speakers outside of their family.  And the
children were all fluent in English and psychologically normal.

> >   Lots of the IALs tend to stress similarity to natlangs as positive
> > features for a given tongue.
> >   The PPC to me would be a "anti-IAL" in that it would have similarities to
> > natlangs, but it's designed not to be easy for native speakers of those
> > languages to learn, but rather to include most or many of the common
> > features of as many languages as possible so that the kids are familar with
> > them.
>
> I seriously doubt that this would work out.  This sounds like a *VERY*
> dangerous and unethical experiment.
Difficult, sure.  Dangerous?  Unethical?  HOW?

> >       This way they won't be in the position of an English speaker trying
> > to master use of tones found in the Asian langs when they try to learn a new
> > language.
>
> Chances are rather that the lack of people other than their siblings or
> parents to talk to will throw your children so badly off the track that
> their talent for learning foreign languages (which is doubtful to
> actually arise from such an experiment) won't help them.  They will be
> so thoroughly alienated from the world around them that they will be
> unable to lead normal lives.  They are likely do develop severe forms of
> paranoia, "Caspar Hauser" syndrome, or whatever.  A one-way ticket to
> psychiatric ward, I'd call this.
Not a valid objection.  As I said before, the children would almost
certainly be bilingual and have no difficulty adjusting to normal social
life.

> If that boggard already has children, they should be taken away from him
> and cleared for adoption, for the sake of the children.  If he has none
> yet, he ought to be castrated and NEVER ever allowed to adopt any!
>
> This is really disturbing.  But even more disturbing to me is that I am
> apparently the first on this list to point it out how monstrous it is,
> while the rest of the list happily replies giving that monster ideas
> what kinds of difficult sounds to build into his Mengelean experiment.
> I am ALARMED by the apparent obliviousness of the conlang community
> towards such wickedness.  It was people like YOU, fellow conlangers, who
> made Auschwitz possible!  Sorry to offend you, but this must be said.
>
> That guy deserves to be locked away, sedated and securely strapped down.
After reading this flame, I'm rather disposed to say that *you* should be
the one locked away--either that or you're joking, and I've completely
missed the humor.

>
> Jörg.
>
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_
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