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

On Wed, 7 Feb 2001 13:31:17 -0500, Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
wrote:

>
>Hmm, I've heard of several occasions where one parent has successfully
>thought his/her child(ren) a natlang that nobody else, not even the other
>parent, in the area speaks/spoke.
>
>Known, this isn't exactly parallel as the parent presumeably told the kid
(s)
>that they where going to go to wherever the lang is actually spoken
sometime
>in the future, giving an extra bit of motivation. But with a less social,
so
>to speak, child than the one you heard of it presumeably should work with a
>conlang too. AFAIK, nobody's experienced any special trouble in teaching
>kids Esperanto - there's even people who have Esperanto as their first
>language.
>
>                                                 Andreas
The greater problem, to me, is in literature - most natlangs will give
access to Shakespeare, Eurypedes, Goethe or Cervantes translations and will
provide some significant national literature, as well as newspapers, comic
books, technical papers, good and bad poetry, nursery rhimes, jokes,
folklore, etc.

Even natlangs that are not written have an impressive ammount of myths and
oral traditions. And, certainly, I suppose that as soon as they adopt a
writing system, they go for translating as much as possible and writing
down their oral knowledge. I can't imagine a little group of people
managing to succeed in a task so huge.

Luís Henrique