Language Acquisition Pranks

People have told me I'd make a good father, and the greater part of me is sincerely flattered. The other part of me, though—the part that would read a Finnish grammar straight through—doesn't quite believe it. A child is a miracle, a focus and giver of affection, a vulnerable but autonomous being, and I agree. But to the inquiring mind, one's child is also a linguistic test subject, minus all that ethical and institutional red tape. Now that's a miracle.

Now in real life, my own child would have to be adopted, and would be raised in an English-speaking culture. Even if I went off the deep end and tried to teach them Backwards Greenlandic, someone would probably stop me from yelling "Qaugnnaignulaan!" at my bewildered three-year-old. For the following scenarios, let's imagine I've married an eccentric billionaire and moved to Siberia with our three children, each adopted at the time of birth. Even the people who do live in Siberia don't talk to us much, as we've weirded them out by doing whatever gay American billionaires do in Siberia.

In this linguistic vacuum, our family could speak however we like. We don't even have to use a human language. Why not, say, an artificially constructed language? We wouldn't even be breaking new ground, as there are over a thousand estimated native speakers of Esperanto. Even geekier on the spectrum, one computational linguist spoke to his newborn son in Klingon for three years. The son did pick up some words, and pronounced Klingon's bizarre phonetics surprisingly well, but soon resorted entirely to English. The prevalence of English was just too powerful, and Klingon's limited vocabulary made it challenging to express certain concepts.

There would be some novelty in bringing a fantasy language to flesh-and-blood life. Take Avatar for instance. After immersion in the world of Pandora, many movie-goers reported depressive or suicidal thoughts when they had to cope with it being fictional. I didn't even see it in 3D, and I thought, "Yeah, go back to your dying planet, Earth people, you suckers deserve it." And then I thought, "Oh." As realistic as special effects get, it's unlikely that we could make that imaginary landscape tangible. But you could teach a child the Na'vi language today, and they would actually speak it. (I've been on the Na'vi forums: the language is pretty straightforward and has a lively community dedicated to its expansion.) The child wouldn't be ten feet tall and blue themselves, but the language, once an imaginary construct, would be absolutely real. And that's pretty mind-blowing.

On the other hand, the results of that are pretty predictable. In the end, you have some native Elvish speakers or whatever, and maybe you can have some fun touring Lord of the Rings conventions while they complain about the hairy dudes examining their ears. No, science demands the unexpected.

There's a science fiction novel called The Embedding which has a language acquisition experiment. The book's title comes from a grammatical device called center embedding, which allows us to say things like "the song the bird sang" and then maybe "the song the bird the girl saw sang," meaning a song sung by a bird that was seen by the girl. Grammatically, we're allowed to embed as much as we want, for example, "the song the bird the girl that man I met liked heard sang" even though our brains can't decode it fast enough. We'd probably resort to "the song sung by the bird the girl saw, and I met a man who liked her." In The Embedding, several orphans are being raised by machines that speak to them in language based upon this type of mind-bending embedding, in an environment with toys like nested dolls that require the children to deal with embedded concepts. The book is horrifying and I wouldn't recommend it, so I feel no qualms about spoiling the end. One of the kids' brains, like, literally explodes.

A less dramatic, real-life example is that of Epun, a fake language with rules that specifically violate what we know about human grammar. To ask a question, for example, you might use the same words, but in reverse order. Or to emphasize something, you would put a particle after the third word in the sentence, regardless of what that word meant. The problem is that these rules have to do with the arithmetic position of the words, not their meaning, and we just aren't equipped to deal with that. Nobody tried to teach a child Epun, but the language-learning savant who took it for a spin was pretty baffled.

I wouldn't want my children's brains to explode, but like these surely well-intentioned scientists, I would want a little surprise at the end of the day. Here's what I'd try.

A More Devious Constructed Language

At one extreme, you could teach the children in Lojban. Lojban is best described as "precision engineered" and uses an argument structure similar to formal logic. For example, the word "book" is not just a noun, but has a surrounding argument structure. In this case it means: "x₁ is a book about subject/theme/story x₂ by author x₃ for audience x₄ preserved in medium x₅." So if I wanted to say that a novel is a book, I could say something like "novel book." And if I wanted to say that the novel is a book about a zebra by Dickens for astronauts and preserved in vellum, then I could simply say "novel book zebra Dickens astronauts vellum," and my meaning would be unambiguously expressed. In Lojban, you cannot be accidentally vague without meaning something you didn't expect. There are a decent number of users, at least one fluent, but I don't know to what degree they utilize Lojban's full expressive range while speaking on the fly. Could a child handle this grammatical rigor, and if so, would they be able to think more critically? Or would they just burst into tears, mourning wordlessly for the simpler language they know instinctively should exist but that was never revealed to them?

The opposite extreme might be Toki Pona. It was based off "Zen principles" of simple living and has only 120 fundamental morphemes. To express "friend" you would say something like "good person" and to say "flower" you would say "color plant." It's cute, I guess. But would children be able to express themselves productively? I don't think their thoughts would be limited. To the contrary, I think they would exhibit extreme creativity in the combination of morphemes, probably building up huge strings for the specific things they want to refer to.

Then there's Dritok, a language spoken by a fictional race of squirrel people lacking vocal cords. Without vocal cords, any voiced sounds including vowels are off limits. The sounds are entirely clicks, fricatives, voiceless stops, and apparently a snort. But, crucially, it has structure enough to express meaning like any other language. You too could have a gaggle of hissing, clicking, snorting children, raised from birth to quell their shouts as if their voice box, like their genitals, were a taboo organ not meant for public display. When they did enter normal society, and heard everyone talking loudly in groups with those offensive vowels, it would be the equivalent of walking into a worldwide apocalyptic orgy. Liberating? Terrifying? Why not both?

Strategic Gibberish

It appears that my billionaire husband and I, in addition to being eccentric, are rapidly becoming sadistic sociopaths. Might as well kick it into high gear.

Strategic Gibberish would simply be English, but for certain somewhat common words like "umbrella" or "light switch," we come up with a random syllable or two, different every time. "It's raining, let's see if I brought a haker. Dang, left the lob at home this time. Gotta stop putting the blan in the back closet." Unless we had super chill kids, they probably wouldn't play along with the game, but instead choose some word to use for "umbrella" among themselves and plot a rebellion, treating our jibberish as just another dad joke. But really, the joke's on them, because they're the ones who never learned any word for "umbrella" and will be speaking nonsense in public.

Or maybe I just want someone to know how I feel when I pronounce "bag" like a Minnesotan and people look at me like I just vomited up Hitler's leftovers.

Double English

Double English is, you guessed it, regular English, except you have to say each word twice. If the kids try and rebel and just say the word once, we would scold them for bad bad grammar grammar. Additionally, saying the word once could express a negative meaning, so that simplifying things would actually mess up what you wanted to say. Would they attempt to replace all words with their opposites so that they could get away with only saying them once?

Broken Questions

Again, just English, and in fact all the vocabulary and grammar stays intact. The only difference is that to ask a question, the inflection doesn't rise at the end, and instead you insert a brusque phlegmy gargle. To indicate "no" you blow a raspberry. To indicate "yes," you breathe in quickly but say nothing. This last one is actually something some Tibetan speakers do, to the confusion of outsiders who wonder if there's a conspiracy to avoid telling them something.

The children can even go to school and learn just fine! They'll just be those kids who speak in monotone and make freaky noises. And to be honest, with reclusive gay dads in Siberia, they would probably be those kids anyway.

Crypto-English

This, I think, would be the most evil of all, but also the most difficult to execute. The previous fake languages might frustrate or embarrass, but the children would have the innate tools to understand language and could pick up English elsewhere, or unlearn a weird version of English in the same way one decodes Pig Latin. Crypto-English, if done right, could prevent them from ever comprehending normal English.

Crypto-English (or maybe Crypto-Russian, if we're indeed in Siberia) would have the regular grammar of English, and also the entire vocabulary. But every word would refer to the meaning of a different word. It would be like those puzzles called cryptograms, where each letter of the alphabet is substituted for another letter, except with whole words. Camel could mean "dinner," and would always mean that. Ukulele could mean "for." Go could mean "what." "What is for dinner tonight" might instead sound like Go your ukulele camel a. If you did want to talk about a "camel," though, you wouldn't just say dinner; it would be something else, like through.

We could print whole books in Crypto-English using a word-substitution script on the computer. Then we could read them to our children, thus giving us a visual aid to make up for our own lack of fluency. Maybe we'd need a robot nanny to speak to the kids in Crypto-English most of the time, but if you're a billionaire, surely you can afford not only technology that doesn't yet exist, but research funding to lead to the exact technological breakthrough you're looking for. Right?

Imagine the big reveal, when the child first meets a group of actual English speakers. The sounds these people are making are definitely them talking, and they're using recognizable words, but the words are all garbled up. Maybe they're crazy. Femur fought wrench do why year? the child asks them, and receives only blank stares and a confused chuckle. Scared, the child runs back and hugs you tight, crying Somewhat, Somewhat! Wander brown for syrup yard!

What? you ask. I don't have any idea what you're saying.