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

From:Mia Soderquist <tuozine@...>
Date:Monday, April 12, 1999, 14:54
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