zenicurean ([info]zenicurean) wrote,
@ 2009-05-13 22:55:00
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Current music:Weird Al Yankovic - White & Nerdy

Why do you think we have this outrageous accent, you silly king?
I was digging up stuff on how South African English accents sound, and I ran across this again. Lots of fun, and a surprisingly valuable writing aid, although they still list a few more languages than they actually have samples of. (Including, for whatever bizarre reason, Esperanto.)


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[info]raygungothic
2009-05-13 08:30 pm UTC (link)
Thank you, that is incredibly useful to me. (I work in English Language Teaching publishing). If ever you are in London I must buy you a pint or three.

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[info]Daniel [oeconomist.com]
2009-05-13 09:05 pm UTC (link)
There is surely some awful misfit out there who raised or is raising his children with Esperanto as their first language.

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[info]petronivs
2009-05-14 02:31 am UTC (link)
How else are they going to ensure it becomes a living language, else by programming their offspring to use it from early on?

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[info]Daniel [oeconomist.com]
2009-05-25 06:46 pm UTC (link)
I'm not precisely sure what you mean by living language so it's hard for me to answer the actual question that you've asked. But a language could have greater currency than does Esperanto without there necessarily having been any speakers for whom it is a first language.

But the real question here is of the costs being imposed on the children and the benefits that they can be expected to reälize. I could imagine a constructed language such that great benefit might flow to someone were a child to be taught it as a first language, but it is important that the marginal benefit to the child be at least as great as the marginal cost to the child.

In the case of Esperanto, I don't even regard the external benefits as significant. Esperanto will never succeed in its ostensible objective, because of its gross bias in favor of Romance language. (Compare Loglan and Lojban, which draw their roots from worlf languages, in rough proportion to the number of speakers.)

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[info]Daniel [oeconomist.com]
2009-05-25 06:52 pm UTC (link)
A couple of days ago, [info]mocketymock.com synchronistically mentioned to me having read mention of a couple of children being raised with Esperanto as their first language (by parents who do not share a first language).

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