Re: first lang test

Dan Sulani wrote:
>The test, as I heard once, is:
>A "first" lang is one that you, _when alone, by yourself_, automatically
>                     a.  count (or do arithmetic) in
>                     b.  cry in
>                     c.  pray in (or whatever you do in times of great
> inner turmoil)
English English English.  Considering that, as I said earlier, three
languages were spoken in my house, this really isn't very impressive. :-)

I wonder, though, whether great emotion necessarily causes you to speak
your first language exclusively.  When I get crying-angry I have a couple
of set phrases in Hokkien, which is a language I don't (at present) use for
anything else.  The reason is that Hokkien sounds like an emotional
language to me, since I don't see it being used in a great variety of
situations, just between my parents when they're speaking privately to each
other, and on the street, mostly for vulgarities.  And other conlangers
have mentioned using languages like Anglo-Saxon in moments of great
emotion, too.  In a way, I think the fact that you *don't* use language X
as a first language makes it possible for you to associate it specifically
with a particular type of (emotional) scenario.  Roald Dahl says somewhere
that his father was Norwegian but wrote his diary in English.

Luís Henrique wrote:
>That said, I wouldn't do such a thing. Kids are different on their language
>abilities. Some are good at it, others are not. I have seen children who
>did indeed suffer when they had to leave their dialect-German at home and
>learn maths, science and history in Portuguese.
We get a lot of kids in Singapore who speak one language at home and then
come to school and have to learn English from scratch.  Or the other way
round.  It's tough for them, even normal kids.  It might look easy to adult
onlookers because the children do indeed learn languages faster than you
have a right to expect, but for the kids themselves it's hell until they
get some fluency in the school language, and even then they're behind.  I
don't remember what my kindergarten experience was like when we moved to
England and I only knew Mandarin and Hokkien, but I've talked to my
first-generation immigrant friends at university about their first years in
America, and I know my brother hated switching back to a Mandarin-speaking
school at age 10 - after one year he still wasn't conversant in Chinese at
all (being younger than me, he'd been raised speaking English at home,
though he'd studied Chinese with me).  Kids aren't all equally adaptable,
even if they're good at learning languages as I know my brother is.  That's
why I felt that the kids in Brian's household ought to hear English from
someone.  Another small thing is that I don't think there's any guarantee
that smart people will have smart kids.

Roger Mills wrote:
>>There's an American non-immigrant living downstairs from me who speaks only
>>conlang to her elder sister; they invented it as children and its lexicon
>>is fiercely guarded from everyone else, including their parents.  Her
>>English certainly hasn't suffered - and they wouldn't give it up for
>>anything.  Last I heard they were going to institute SOV word order, now
>>that they've both learnt Latin.
>
>Uh-oh, isn't there some way you could get them to reveal it to you, before
>they muck it up with Latin? ;-)  Seriously, it sounds very interesting.  I
>suppose there are similar cases that have been been reported, but probably
>mostly from quite young children--and often twins.  This one sounds like
>it's been going on for a while (if they''re learning Latin, they would be
>teenagers at least?)
MUCK IT UP?!? :-)  They've been instituting deliberately-constructed
changes all their lives!  They really have been treating it as a conlang
all along, it seems to me, though they probably wouldn't know the word if
you asked them.  I asked once if the phonology was basically like English,
and she said she'd never thought about it but it probably was.  She's a
college senior (same class as me) and her sister's older than that.  I
would love to ask her more, but she's very sensitive about it -
embarrassed, and slightly paranoid - thinks that people are trying to learn
it so they can listen to her phone conversations with her sister.

By the way, I don't know if anyone's still interested months after the
death of that thread, but I asked that Japanese professor about "boku", a
while back, and she said something rather interesting - that she had heard
high school girls using it, but not for the past 5 years.  Her opinion was
that it was a fad that had died.

E-Ching