My friend and I were practically having a shouting match over this. My friend claims that it’s impossible to learn esperanto as your first language. You must have some other “natural” language first or else your brain can’t use it. If you brought up a child in a purely esperanto environment the child wouldn’t be able to talk, or so my friend says.
I called bullshit on this and demanded a cite. His cite is “My friend heard it from his linguistics professor.” That was not enough to persuade me, as it this claim seemed to defy all common sense to me. Why would it be impossible to learn it as your first language?
If both parents spoke it all the time to each other as well as to teh child, and if the child was home schooled in an environment that had no TV or radio (or Internet), and if the child had no friends and was never able to meet his family or anyone else, then yes s/he would grow up with esperanto as his/her first language.
That’s a truly bizarre claim. I’ve read that some children are raised by Esperantist parents as native speakers of Esperanto (though of course bilingual in their community’s natural language.) There’s nothing about Esperanto that makes it impossible as a first language, and why should there be? It’s too bad your friend didn’t have some sort of reasoning to back this claim up, because it would be interesting to hear what it is.
Suffice it to say, though, it’s not true. Esperanto has various shortcomings that could be enumerated. Off the top of my head, there’s the bizarre sexism of its gender system; the excessive number of derivational affixes that cause truly odd homonyms - ‘filino’ can mean, for instance, ‘dirty linens’ (fi+lino), ‘daughter’ (fil+ino), or cat; and the various poor choices that make it unsuitable as an international language. None of these things makes it impossible to learn for a child, though. If a child’s parents chose to raise it in an environment in which Esperanto was the only linguistic input, it would learn it and it wouldn’t learn any other language until it ventured out into the wider world. This is impractical enough that I doubt there are any monolingual Esperanto speakers, but there’s no inherent linguistic reason it couldn’t happen.
The thought that a child could only speak esperanto is very funny…I think it would make a great pitch for a Hollywood movie.
But I don’t see why a child couldn’t learn it as a first language, assuming that was the only language spoken and taught. Certainly no more difficult than Russian or Chinese or Arabic or English.
The Wikipedia article says there are a thousand or so native speakers of Esperanto, which indicates they were raised in an Esperanto-speaking environment. Even if it didn’t say that, the claim is ridiculous.
I know of several bilingual children who have Esperanto as one of their first languages. I’ve never heard of any specific problems, just the usual problems of convincing the child to keep speaking the non-community language as they grow up and so forth, which are common to many bilingual families. Of course, raising a child to speak only Esperanto would require such a high degree of artificial isolation that I doubt it’s ever been attempted.
I don’t believe a linguistics professor would say any such thing; I suspect that what the prof actually said got garbled in transmission somewhere.
The affective aspect of language acquisition (or, to put it in the vernacular, the child turning round and saying “No more of this bullshit!” to their parents) cannot be underestimated.
I often think he’s something like the Freud of linguistics. Famous, and inclined to make sweeping judgments on the basis of his own navel-gazing. Unlikely to leave any lasting historical significance.
I can see where your friend is coming from. There’s certainly a lot we don’t understand about languages, especially acquisition. So it could be that child couldn’t learn constructed languages “as well” as s/he could natural languages, (especially if you believe Chomsky’s Innate Grammar Theory) and the constructed language doesn’t conform to it (how or why we may not know). But as shown in above posts, there have been children that have learned constructed languages.
If i were to construct some language without without much rhyme or reason, it stands to show that children could very well not be able to learn such a language. But Esperanto was constructed with careful adherance to known language patterns, so it makes sense that it can be learned with as much ease as natural languages.
While some of what Chomsky says may be full of hot-air, but to say he won’t have any lasting historical significance is ludicrous. He has made innumerable contributions to the field of linguistics.
Ah, Esperanto, my favorite foreign language! I did a staff report regarding the language. My research turned up the interesting tidbit that there’s an estimated 1000 persons who speak Esperanto as their native language. The Ethnologue’s page for Esperanto gives an estimate of 200 to 2000 native speakers as of 1996. That same also lists Esperanto as a language of France, presumably where those native speakers reside.
One of my professors and I had mixed opinions of Chomsky: he liked the man’s politics but not his linguistics; I liked some of the man’s linguistics but not his politics.
I think it would be safe to say Chomsky has already established a place for himself in the history of linguistics.
To learn about what a worthless participant Chomsky is an academic debate, read The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris or Ideology and Linguistic Theory by Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith. They’re about the debate between the Generative Semantics and the Generative Syntax schools in the 1960’s and 1970’s. While Chomsky may have introduced a few interesting ideas, he screws up debates with his worthless argumentation.
Chomsky’s theories are so heavily based upon omphaloskepsis that it’s embarrassing to those who understand and value the idea of science. I do rather agree with many of his political views, but his lasting impact upon linguistic theory will quite certainly be minor.
Certainly also, a child can learn an artificial language as his or her first and only language. There may not be many (or any at all) exclusive speakers of Esperanto, but there are surely quite a few folks who speak Swahili exclusively, and that’s an artificial language, too.