Re: Teaching children conlangs

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 22:00:10 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>There was this guy who tried to teach his son Klingon this way. Apparently
>didn't work very well - IIRC, when the kid understood that the father
>understood English, he refused to use Klingon anymore. Conservation of effort,
>I guess.
'Gavin Edwards, in the August '99 issue of Wired magazine (p. 66), writes
about the first native Klingon speaker, Alec Speers. His father, d'Armond
Speers, had been raising Alec to be bilingual in English and Klingon. Alec
would respond to Klingon and could sing Klingon filk songs with his father,
but lost interest in the language when he was three (he's now five). One
difficulty the elder Speers encountered was that the lexicon was too small
and didn't have words for many of the objects of a toddler's world
("bottle", "diaper" and "table", which Speers expressed using a
circumlocution meaning "thing which is flat"). Edwards concludes his article
saying, "Not long after Speers gave up, Klingon language architect Mark
Okrand released Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, which included 1,000 new
words, including one for table."' - http://www.langmaker.com/199907.htm

Best regards,

Jeffrey