A slightly less forbidden experiment? (was Re: The Forbidden Experiment)

Irina>>>>>>
On Thu, 25 Nov 1999, Paul Bennett wrote:

> Please tell us more!  Is it "real" conlanging?
I think so. They sing elaborate songs, reproduceable (they remember
them for a day or so, and then forget them because they go on to do
other things and can't write them down yet) and tell us "that's a
song in my language". They make up words for things, not purely a
relex, but things like "coat and shoes" (as a unit), or "to have an
elephant" (and then "to have a large elephant" is a recognizably
cognate word).
<<<<<<

I don't know how well they've grasped the fundamentals of reading/writing, but
I've had an idea:
An interesting parallel experiment might be to encourage them to con-script,
(they write down the squiggles and provide a pronounciation, and you provide a
romanisation) or to teach them characters or digraphs beyond those in Dutch (IPA
symbols?) to express any phones that occur in their songs/words that are outside
of junior-school Dutch.  The former method might help them learn to read/write,
while the latter could possibly slow them down, IMHO.  Actually, do their
songs/words contain phones that aren't part of Dutch?

The con-scripting idea might actually be very, very interesting from all kinds
of viewpoints, provided they have some idea of what writing is for, even if
they're not fully adept at "real" writing yet.

Is much known of the writing acquisition and usage in biscriptal(?) children?

I recall that you posted to the list before about the "coat & shoes" thing.
Wasn't it etymologised to a kind of compound of "shoe" and "coat"?  I like the
existence of a verb "to have an elephant", by the way, and may have to borrow it
:-)






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