Minnesota dad spoke only Klingon to child for three years | Hacker News Reader

Minnesota dad spoke only Klingon to child for three years

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10 pointstokenadult19 comments

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.

Herodotus 2.2 gives an instance of a similar experiment tried by Egyptian king Psammetichus. Here the children were exposed to no language. Eventually they uttered a word ('bekos') that was deemed to be Phrygian.

http://old.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/hdtbk2.html

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).

Yeah in fact as it turns out his kid acquired English fine in school and forgot how to speak Klingon, just like most immigrant kids whose parents speak to them in a language that they don't use anywhere else in their lives.

What I really find amusing is that this incident is from 10 years ago, but the original link breathlessly reports it like breaking news.

Wired, August 1999: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8

Huh, the lengths some people will go to for content. The original page did seem suspect.

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.

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.

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).

Why do you believe point #1? Sure, you should include historical speakers, and speakers of particular interest, but if no one has ever said anything important in Klingon, why does speaking it have any value at all?

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.

Today I'm proud to be a Minnesotan.

"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.

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

Likewise, who created programming languages? :)

Programmers. Ergo...

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

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

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

I hope this is a hoax.

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