A short article about a guy who tried to teach his toddler Klingon. It basically didn't work.
From Wired magazine.
Here is the text of the article:
When we last checked in with Klingon linguist d'Armond Speers ("Dejpu'bogh Hov rur qabllj!" Wired 4.08, page 84), he had embarked on an ambitious project: to teach his toddler Alec to be bilingual in English and Klingon. Now that Alec's reached his fifth birthday, how's the effort going?
"I had a tremendously hard time talking to him about everyday things," Speers confesses. Klingon's vocabulary at the time was only about 2,000 words, and it lacked some crucial vocabulary, such as words for bottle and diaper.
So Speers found himself using "thing which is flat" for table. "Alec very rarely spoke back to me in Klingon, although when he did, his pronunciation was excellent and he never confused English words with Klingon words," Speers says. "But we did sing Klingon songs together." (A RealAudio file of Alec singing is at www.bigfoot.com/~dspeers/klingon/resources.htm.) "Eventually he stopped listening to me when I spoke in Klingon. It was clear that he didn't enjoy it, and I didn't want to make it into a problem, so I switched to English about two years ago."
Too bad. Not long after Speers gave up, Klingon language architect Marc Okrand released Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, which included 1,000 new words, including one for table.
- Gavin Edwards
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1 comment:
This guy was in the wikipedia article. Two problems. One, he didn't ONLY teach the kid Klingon, so of course he is going to favor English. Second, the guy stuck to proper Kingon which lacks essential words like milk. This problem, however, has been overcome by many. I am sure that Hamlet uses words that don't exist in the Star Trek world. I believe there is a dictionary that is unofficial that would solve this problem. You just need to keep the kid isolated from English. That means no movies or talking dolls. And when he learns how to read, it needs to only be the three books mentioned in Klingon. Being rased on only those three books could be an experiment in and of itself.
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