From: strom@Watson.Ibm.Com (Rob Strom)
Subject: Re: Re:Los nin~os que hablan esperanto [La infanoj kiu parolas esperanton]
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 02:34:47 GMT
Distribution: soc
Organization: IBM Research

In article <1993Jan21.005400.9293@udel.edu>, wagenfuh@huey.udel.edu (Karl Wagenfuehr) writes:

|> 
|> I wonder where the children of non-native french speakers were
|> raised:  in France or in the US?  I can't believe that children
|> raised in the US (or any other place where there is a non-pidgin
|> language) truly learn real French or even a new creolizeation of
|> a french pidgin.  I thought that when a viable language already
|> exists that the need which creates a creol doesn't exist -- only
|> when a viable language doesn't exist does a creol get created.
|> But I've been wrong before; please write more about this.
|> -- 

(Sorry, I cannot write fluently in Esperanto;  I appreciate
that Karl has taken the trouble to translate my comments)

I will have to look up the study again.  It's been
a long time, and I've forgotten the reference. To the best
of my recollection, the couple were native speakers
of English, and the children were raised in an
English speaking country (I think the USA), although occasionally
a French speaker would visit the family and occasionally
the family would visit France.  I believe at least
one of the parents was a psycholinguist, and the
decision to raise the children in French was taken
to answer the scientific question.

The children developed fluency in French, in that they
spoke without the occasional errors in sentence structure,
inappropriate uses of tenses and genders, etc., which characterized
their parents' speech.  The children were conscious of their
parents' lack of fluency, and would attempt to correct
their parents' speech errors.  The children's speech
was acceptable to native French speakers.

As I understand it, Edelmiro's prediction with
respect to Esperanto is that because of Esperanto's alleged
lack of suitable universal features, the same
experiment with Esperanto substituted for French
will yield different results.  His prediction would
be that either the children would not learn
Esperanto at all, or that they would speak a
creole-Esperanto whose syntax was significantly
different from the Esperanto which the parents
were attempting to approximate.

I would expect that the situation of Esperantist
parents raising their child in Esperanto has already
occurred, so the data to confirm or refute
Edelmiro's prediction ought to exist somewhere.

The fact that international conferences can be
held in Esperanto does not refute Edelmiro's claim;
international conferences can be held in Pidgin
English too, but it remains true that children
brought up in Pidgin English don't speak Pidgin English.

My personal speculation is that Esperanto will
turn out to resemble French much more than Pidgin
English, but since the facts have to be out there,
I'd like to see someone familiar with the Esperanto
community post them.


-- 
Rob Strom, strom@watson.ibm.com, (914) 784-7641
IBM Research, 30 Saw Mill River Road, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY  10598
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto,soc.culture.latin-america