His point was that a child raised in an exclusively Esperanto environment would learn only Esperanto. If a child was raised in a home that spoke only Esperanto but was exposed to English-language media, peers, and schooling, it would end up bilingual. The question was about the possibility of a child learning only Esperanto.
Uh, no it’s not. It’s a trade language that’s spread far from its origins, and like many languages used over very wide areas it’s lost some of the morphological and phonological complexity of some of its fellow Bantu languages (much like, say, Mandarin or Persian). It’s not an artificial language at all.
To add one point to the discussion: Obviously, no artificial language is going to be entirely complete and specified off-the-shelf, as it were, whether it be Esperanto or a heavily standardized natural language like Swahili. Language is just too complex to be codified comprehensively in a book or any other medium (at least with the current state of the art).
But when exposed to such a language, children will naturally creolize it, or in other words, fill in the gaps.
Here’s a link (warning: PDF) to a paper that explores this issue and discusses some of the peculiar features of native-speaker Esperanto:
I was about to say that, except you said it much better than I would have.
I’d expect a community of kids speaking Esperanto natively would, within a generation, mutate it into a more natural dialect, and a generation or two after that, it might not even be Esperanto anymore.
Unquestionably true. Prior to the development of American Sign Language in the early nineteenth century, it was not at all uncommon for deaf families to communicate entirely in ‘home signs’—a signed language of their own invention, and known only to them. This practice still persists in some impoverished African nations.
In fact, I think that American Sign Language is the best example of an artificial language that has become the language of a community (although it’s a community that’s geographically spread out), even though it’s less than two hundred years old. Many children learn it as their first language. Several hundred thousand people speak it. There’s a university (Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.) where all classes are taught in it.
No. Bi- or multilingualism in their environment is the norm for more people worldwide than monolingualism is. Indeed, the very label “first language” carries a suggestion that the child chooses (or has chosen for it) one language out of at least two available in the speech situation. For what it’s worth, my kid (9) speaks Cantonese as her first language, here understood to mean “stronger” language. It’s hardly first in the sense that she started acquiring it before she started acquiring English. I spoke English to her from the start; her mother spoke Cantonese to her from the start. Cantonese is then, in the literal sense, her mother('s) tongue. (So, we’ve determined that “first language” is a far from unproblematic label.)
Well, let the literature (preferably by researchers with no Esperanto axe to grind, in peer-reviewed journals - together with any rebuttals) show that I’m wrong. But my belief/contention would indeed be that, unless you closet the kid away (no kindergarten, nursery school etc), by the time it’s of school age (5/6), it will no longer be speaking Esperanto as its “first language”. It will have become (one of) its auxiliary/other languages. As I say, I think, above all else, the affective factors work too powerfully: “God, mum, dad, why did you make me learn this when all the other kids tease the hell out of me?” (ad nauseam)
While in Europe I encountered a GI who had married a German woman and they had had a child. In the home, each parent understood the other’s language but spoke only their own. One day the kid heard the radio, tuned to a German station where the announcer was a man, and announced that “that man is talking woman language.”
Uh, I hate to question you since you know so much more about this subject than I do, but from what I’ve read, ASL isn’t an artificial language at all. It’s more or less a creole of Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language and French Sign Language. It’s an entirely natural language from everything I’ve seen on the subject.
In fact, sign languages seem to arise just as readily in deaf communities as spoken languages do in hearing communities. There was a group of deaf children in Nicaragua who spontaneously developed Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example.
It certainly is. I would venture that the kids of Esperantist parents who were initially reared with the language would probably resemble children of immigrants; from what I can recall from studies of the course I took last spring in sociolinguistics of United States Spanish, children who grow up in households speaking exclusively Spanish tend to have a good deal of facility in both languages, but it’s rarely the case that any bilingual person has exactly equal ability in both languages. For starters, competence in any particular area is often tied to one particular language - for example, many kids have a greater mastery of English in academic areas and of Spanish in more homely areas like cooking.
It’s tough to make broad generalizations, and I don’t remember where I put my course materials. One study I read had a very heavily statistical breakdown of language use among Latinos from immigrant families; the children of immigrants generally had greater ability in English by adulthood despite the presence of a substantial Spanish-speaking community. Of course, it varies greatly - while most of them spoke mostly English in their day-to-day lives, and had greater competence in English, some remained largely Spanish-speaking.
Our hypothetical Esperantist child probably doesn’t benefit from a community reinforcing Esperanto use on a continual, day-to-day basis; chances are virtually certain that knowledge of the majority language would be required for any sort of social success (contrast the Latino communities in which some few members managed to grow up and find jobs that only required Spanish.) Since the pressures to learn the majority language would be even stronger for our Esperantist child than they are for children in large U.S. immigrant communities, I’m thinking the kids would be even less likely to retain strong use of Esperanto.
Most of them would probably maintain a good deal of ability in the language. But very few of them would likely use it into adulthood, beyond communication with parents. And that’s assuming that the parents maintain Esperanto use when the kids grow up and become more and more steeped in the majority language. I’m guessing the parents’ resolve would wane fairly quickly when the kid comes home from school and doesn’t speak Esperanto. Although if the parents were determined enough, it could turn into one of those households where the parents speak one language to the children, and the children reply in the other.
Another language acquisition story I like while we’re on our intermission: kid is about 5 years old, and never speaks. Parents have done all the tests, for deafness etc, and there’s nothing wrong with him. One day, kid is eating ice cream, sees mum in the kitchen and asks her for more. Mum glows inside, resists urge to hug kid and phone hubby, and as calmly as she can gives the kid his extra helping. Unable to help herself, she asks: “Why did you just talk then, darling, and not before?” “Well,” he replied, “I never wanted more ice cream before.” Such a utilitarian view of language is thankfully uncommon.
I know a family in which the parents and the kids don’t have a common language in which they can all speak together simultaneously. The husband is French, and his wife is Indian whose native language is Tamil. The parents speak to each other in English, but she does not speak French and he does not speak Tamil. Their kids, though, have learned both French and Tamil but not English. If they speak English the kids can’t understand; if they speak Tamil the husband can’t understand; and if they speak French the wife can’t understand. (It’s not quite as bad as that, since I’m sure that they each have some knowledge of the other language, but they just can’t communicate very well in it.)
You’re both right. It’s more like a Creole ‘with a little boost’. Clerc and Gallaudet developed it from FSL, Martha’s Vineyard SL, and added a lot that they made up themselves. Linguists generally agree, however, that it is a naturally occurring language.
Wha??? Sattua wants some explanation. KiSwahili is the native language of millions of people and has been for many generations; it is without a doubt a natural language just like English or Mandarin.
What I understand about children who grow up in Esperanto-only environments is that 1) they will elaborate it into something nearly as messy and sloppy as a natural language, and 2) they will be damaged by the impoverished linguistic environment.
One of my childhood friends wound up in Germany getting his PhD in linguistics. Several years ago he was back in the US for a visit and told me about one of his friends in the same program. She was raised speaking Esperanto, it’s her native language. She also speaks several other languages, as her field of study would suggest…
Same friend married a girl from Turkey. The only common language that they had at the time was German, second to both of them.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the category “artificial language” is an artificial category. There are things like American Sign Language, where there was a deliberate effort to create a language, but the creators used existing languages as well as their own creations. There are also cases like Esperanto, where the language was deliberately created, but the creator used vocabulary and grammar from a number of languages. Then there are cases like Elvish or Klingon, where the creators tried not to use vocabulary from existing languages.
The degree of artificiality of the language has nothing to do with whether it’s possible for it to turn into the native language of a community, as long as there’s sufficient vocabulary (and maybe grammar) in it to start with. The first children to learn it natively will begin creolizing it like crazy to produce a usable language. Remember, most creoles arise from pidgins, which are clearly not generally usable languages.
Interesting sub-discussion about Noam Chomsky’s linguistics. I’d be curious to know more about his being considered a crank by some people. Can those who know about it follow me here?
Esperanto as it was invented is an artificial language because it’s too damn simple. A person will not tolerate such linguistic simplicity as a first-and-only language, and will create complications and exceptions. If there is somewhere a community of people who grew up speaking it, their own version of it is almost certainly very, very different from by-the-book Esperanto.
What do you mean by saying it’s “too damn simple”? In what respect is it particularly simple, and how would that prevent its usefulness as a language?
My understanding is that Esperanto has changed somewhat since its inception as its community of speakers has grown. But most of those changes are fairly minor all in all and I’m not sure it’s become more complex at all.
In a natural language there are a lot of formal rules, and then there is a list of exceptions to every formal rule. My understanding of Esperanto is that it was invented to exclude these lists of exceptions, making it easier to learn as a second language than any natural language would be–because once you’ve learned the rule, you’re good to go in all situations in which that rule would be used. My understanding is also that the human mind rebels against this simplicity, when it is imposed as a first language. The mind wants to work hard, in this respect. Language learning is one of the first mental exercises a new brain ever gets to do… in this situation the brain wants to build itself up, not make things as easy as possible.