

Minnesota dad spoke only Klingon to child for three years - tokenadult
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/dinkytown_dad_s.php

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gruseom
That strikes me as unethical and even depraved. Is that why you have children
- so you can run experiments on them that would never be permitted otherwise?
It reminds me of B.F. Skinner keeping his daughter in a box, except that story
was untrue.

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charlesju
I have 3 contentions with what you just said.

1\. I do not think languages that are under-used have less value than
languages that are used more. If this man values Klingon, he ought to be able
to teach his kid the language.

2\. Using your own assumptions, you can make similar arguments for teaching
"lesser" languages like Spanish or Chinese in an English speaking environment.
I think that is a dangerous and scary proposition.

3\. Most children are able to pick up the english language outside of the
household (ie. every single 2nd generation immigrant from a non-english
speaking country).

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gruseom
Klingon is not a language, it's a contrivance. #2 is bizarrely unrelated to
anything I said. #3 is obvious and irrelevant.

Language is a critical part of human development right from the beginning.
Depriving a child of this, and by extension of a normal parent-child
connection, in the name of some arbitrary curiosity strikes me as perverse.

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charlesju
My point is that no one should be able to decide whether or a language is a
"contrivance" or not. It is a slippery slope that is a dangerous because any
language (ie. Chinese) can be deemed contrivance and thus "unethical to teach"
using your same logic.

This can be compared to someone teaching their child their own religion. No
one should be able to restrict that because religion (and most human belief,
pending that it doesn't hurt others or themselves) ought to be outside the
bounds of morality.

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quant18
I fail to see the slippery slope. The whole point of teaching your kid a
language, or a set of manners, or religious rituals, or whatever, is to enable
him to participate in a community. Raising your child into a fangroup
organised around a violent species from a television show is qualitatively
different from raising him into a real world minority community with an actual
cultural and social life.

The "Klingon community" has no system of helping its members to make friends
or find mates, no useful information about the real world, no "payload" of
beneficial values to inculcate in its members (as PG put it in "Lies we tell
kids"), no inspirational works of art produced by people it recognises as
intellectual forebears, etc. That makes it objectively inferior to pretty much
any "involuntary" (religious/ethnic/geographical) community no matter how
small, and even most "voluntary" communities (e.g. hackers).

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alan_p
It's perfectly legitimate. It's fine to speak to your child in a language that
is not the official language in the country you live in. It's obviously more
helpful if SOMEONE also speaks to the child in the official language, but
that's besides the point.

Klingon is a constructed language, but it is sufficiently complex to be
generative enough for actual use. Constructed languages aren't evil or
irrelevant either -- look at Esparanto, which has a substantial amount of
native or fluent speakers (more so than some "real" dialects).

Sapir-Whorf (heh, Worf) notwithstanding, we know that the "choice" of native
language does not affect the child's cognitive capabilities negatively in any
way (basically, as all languages are generative, you can express everything in
any language -- if you lack the words, you make them up).

It's unusual, but it's hardly something to get your panties in a bunch over.
There's no difference between speaking to your child in Klingon or any other
minority language, constructed or natural. That's the beauty of it. The human
mind is quite adaptive when it comes to utilizing language.

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genieyclo
Today I'm proud to be a Minnesotan.

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Grinnmarr
"I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first
language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,"

Klingon is a human language! Who does he think created Klingon. And he has a
Phd? Nice logic.

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KC8ZKF
I suspect "human language" has a very specific meaning among linguists.

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crux
'human language' actually means very little among linguists. If he were being
very precise he'd say 'natural language'.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Then I think he meant " _any_ human language", which makes more sense than
"any _human_ language."

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GiraffeNecktie
According to the comments after the article this story is both inaccurate and
15 years old.

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rms
I hope this is a hoax.

