tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 23 12:12:06 1996
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Re: "Native Speakers"
- From: "Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: "Native Speakers"
- Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 12:12:06 -0800
You might be interested in the fiction of linguist Suzette Haden Elgin. Once you
get past the sexual politics of the books (Men - bad, Women - good) she has
quite a lot to say about linguistics, and she knows her stuff.
A premise of the fiction is that Earth has joined a galactic society and
linguists are needed to master thousands of alien tongues and serve as vital
interpreters for trade and diplomatic negotiations. One of the tricks used in
the books involves the children of linguists, who are placed in contact with
aliens during infancy, so that they grow up with linguistic input from them, and
acquire native fluency in the alien language (as well as several others).
Given that there will be folks like d'Armond who raise their children with
Klingon, the supposition is that they will develop the same kind of tacit
knowledge of the language that native speakers of any language acquire. Of
course, while we might expect them to be able to tell us things about Klingon
we'd never stumlbe over ourselves, this will only work for children raised by
parents with high second language proficiency in Klingon.
Several qep'a'mey from now things are going to get VERY interesting!
Lawrence
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:: Dr Lawrence M Schoen, Director :: The KLI is a nonprofit ::
:: The Klingon Language Institute :: tax exempt corporation ::
:: POB 634, Flourtown, PA 19031 USA :: DaH HuchlIj'e' ghonob ::
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:: [email protected] :: [email protected] ::: 215/836-4955 ::
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