Re: What are mothers for? WAS:Another little translation exercise

Irina Rempt wrote:
> I'm not Mia, but I have three of my own (all intelligent and
> inquisitive little girls) and no, I don't teach them Valdyan though I
> do use the occasional phrase, as I do of other languages that happen
> to float around in our house such as Latin and Welsh and Denden.
>
> I'm not nearly fluent enough. Besides, if they're going to learn a
> second language, let them pick up Turkish at school (from immigrant
> kids), it's *really* useful. And if they turn out to be interested,
> they know that it's OK to make up languages and they can start on
> their own.
I seem to have lost the original question that was directed at me, but
my situation is similar to this. I had started speaking ea-luna with
Liam (now almost 2), but I was quickly discouraged by my lack of fluency
and started using Spanish instead. I am not really even terribly
consistent with Spanish, since I am surrounded by monolingual English
speakers in my family. It doesn't seem to be hurting anything, in any
case. Liam's English vocabulary is pretty large, although perhaps a bit
odd. (He said "gerbil" before he said "papa"... Clearly rodents play too
large a part in our family life. (laugh)) He answers Spanish with
English. I can accept that, I guess.

I have recently revived ea-luna as a language for writing, which seems
to be improving my fluency. It has been good for the language too-- it
has developed more in the last 2 weeks than in the entire 2 years
before. It would be nice to have someone to converse with in ea-luna,
but I don't think my kids will ever learn it. I don't really expect
anyone other than myself to ever learn very much of it. That's ok too.
It's a great privacy language, if nothing else. :)

Mia