we all remember furbys, those annoying little owl like robots we bought our kids thinking they were a good idea. Well, we all no they were in fact a horrible idea but still, would it be possible for a child to learn furbish (their language) from too much interaction with them instead of English?
If so i pity the poor confused mother
Mark Question
Quite simply, no. Not as a language. “Furbish” has no meaning, therefore is not a language. It systematically recreates certain behaviors, expressions, etc., and hints at linguistic sounds to which we subconciously add much more. Only through this imposition of what we ‘expect’ a creature to do to we think it has any understanding - in the same way we anthropomorphise the ability of dogs to obey commands.
Furbish is a pseudolanguage; it consists of a very small vocabulary of sylables that can be combined in a few dozen ways; it isn’t complex enough to be useful as a proper language. Teach the kid Klingon or Sindarin or something instead.
Would children not still mnage to pick up the vocabulary they use(furbish) and try and speak it to their parents?also it could mess up their characteristics like using a sad voice wen they are happy because the furby does
BTW, I learned the other day that a Furby contains only a single electric motor; all of the movements are driven by a series of cams, clutches and gears.
There is no vocabulary, as such. There’s a collection of sounds, but the only way they could acquire meaning is by association with true words. Without any independent meaning, Furbish couldn’t pose such problems.
To answer that would necessitate imposing really serious isolation and emotional harm on a child, to create a Furbish-dominated environment. It’s been tried (in the idea that children would, devoid of all outside influence, grow up speaking pure Hebrew). But nobody really knows what true isolation would do to linguistic development, and it’s not an experment that we want to encourage.
There is a modicum of structure to Furbish; having uttered a given set of syllables, the device will usually then respond to external stimuli in predictable ways (but different predictable ways than it would if it had uttered a different set of syllables. There is therefore the rudiments of a feedback system; it could be argued that, for example, a given utterance means ‘please tickle me’, based on the observation that ticlking the device elicits a positive response, whereas, perhaps, patting it does not. It isn’t all randomness and anthropomorphism.
Having said all that, the range of utterances and actions is strictly and severely limited. The ‘language’ simply isn’t rich enough to be useful in any other context than playing with a Furby.
As far as it goes, didn’t a lot of kids who got one of those things learn “Furbish” anyway? To keep their little mechanical friend “happy”, they had to respond in certain ways to specific Furby utterances and “actions”.
However, I concur with the others here who have said that “Furbish” wouldn’t be a rich or dynamic enough “language” for actual interaction.
WHenever I see a furby, I can only think of one thing:
Whatever you do, never ever feed them after midnight.