It’s an experiment that was bound to happen – a linguist has taught his child to be fluent in both Klingon and English. There is a lot of mockery occurring…even though this story is on a science fiction forum. It’s definitely an unusual concept.

So what are my thoughts? While I’m not sure it would be something I would do, it may or may not be too drastic. A lot depends on whether the parent, computational linguist d’Armond Speers spoke ONLY in Klingon or BOTH Klingon in English. The original story from the Minnesota Daily says only Klingon, but a comment from Ultralingua (who uses Speers as a consultant) claims it was both Klingon and English.

Given that Speers is said to be a linguist and that news articles often distort linguistic issues, I will give Speers the benefit of the doubt. Even if he only spoke Klingon, I will assume that other relatives used English, so his son would be in a bilingual environment. That means, that I think it’s safe to assume that the son did acquire English. (P.S. According to Wired, his wife used English so that their son could become bilingual)

What about the Klingon acquired? One question I had is how different the phonology would be from English. In theory Klingon has non-English sounds…but again there are no real native speakers of Klingon. For most adult speakers, I am assuming that Klingon in the U.S. is essentially spoken with a U.S. English accent (and local accents elsewhere). I don’t know what Dr. Speers Klingon accent is like, but I will assume HE learned it as an adult and that his native language(s) will impact his Klingon phonology.

I would have the same question about morphology and syntax. Although there are non-English features built in to Klingon, again the fluent speakers are almost all adult learners (who probably use it in limited circumstances). I suspect that local language features creep in.

The result may actually be something like a creole Klingon, similar to creoles in the Caribbean, Africa and the South Pacific. These are the result of children being exposed to pidginized European languages. In many cases, particularly in the South Pacific, we know that the result is a language with a European lexical items but with lots of Austronesian features included (words, grammatical structure, changes in pronunciation). These features are one reason why an English creole like Tok Pisin is unrecognizable from standard English

Another question is whether the child will maintain Klingon or not. In theory he could remain bilingual…but I suspect he will begin to encounter “negative attitudes from his peer group” in elementary school if not sooner. That is, if he speaks Klingon with other children, few will understand and there may be serious jeering involved. We do know from research that if your peer group does not use a form and/or expresses a hostile attitude, the child will NOT be motivated to maintain it. Both is pretty fatal. There is a good chance the Klingon fluency will be diminished from lack of overall use.

The truth is that the “Klingon community” has a hard battle. Obviously, its nobody’s native language, and unlike other minority languages, few professional linguists are interested. They tend to worry more about languages with longer histories and actual native speakers which are in danger of becoming extinct. The fact that the language is associated with a “fringe” culture gives it even less credibility.

We linguists may be acting a little closed minded though. Clearly someone cared enough about this language to pass it on. And it is not the first time an “artificial language” has been acquired by children – I have heard that some children have been taught Esperanto from birth. One commenter says that some people meet and marry through learning Esperanto, so that Esperanto would become the household language. Again I assume that an Esperanto speaking child would eventually become bilingual in some other language (because I am really not aware of a large-scale monolingual Esperanto community).

I do think it is worth investigating the Esperanto phenomenon, because we would be seeing another way to create a “new” fully human language. Ironically though, I think if more Esperanto native speakers are born, Esperanto will do the one thing it’s not supposed to do – develop into local dialects and begin to get the irregularities that other human languages have.

P.S. – Actual Results

Trust Wikipedia to have additional information. Apparently this experiment was attempted in the late 1990s, but as expected the child Alec eventually chose English as his main language. The article also reports that there were many missing lexical items in Klingon including table and pacifier. If this were like other dual language scenarios, I suspect that Klingon would be acquiring a lot of English borrowings….

Book Product Details (from Amazon.com)

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian; First Edition edition (October 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 006136925X
ISBN-13: 978-0061369254

Review

One of my Christmas gifts last year was Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling (Hardcover) by David Wolman. It’s obstenaibly a history of English spelling, but really it’s a history of English spelling reform. That is, if you are curious as to why there’s an “e” in Phoenix, this book may or may or may not have an answer. But if you’ve ever wondered why they have to keep teaching this spelling in school even though the “e” is not really pronounced…then this book is for you.

One thing I like about this book is the hard-nosed attitude towards English spelling. Wolman is one of the many people in modern society who’s been chided all his life for his non-mastery of the crazy rules of English spelling. He’s realized that it’s not that he is who is lacking logic…rather it’s the English spelling system that could use some reform. He, along with many in the English spelling reform movement, ask if it is really necessary to burden our children with learning the difference between ‘night’ versus ‘knight’ when ‘nite’ works just fine.

Of course spelling reform is easier conceptualized than implemented, especially in a society which has forgone an official language board. This is a history of spelling rule formation, disintegration and call for reform. The book begins in the Old English period when spelling was something scholars made up as they went along, but at least it was phonetically consistent.

It moves quickly through Middle English when French brought some new spelling conventions to England to the era of printing, which is where most of the problems began. Widespread literacy requires a standardized spelling, but the codifiers were actually just printers trying to get a publication to press. Occasionally, they may have been Dutch printers at that who guestimated English spelling convention. Combine that with the fact that English already had both English and French spelling rules and was going through some serious sound shifts, and you will end up with a decidedly quirky system.

The rest of the book runs through different standardization and reform events ranging from Samuel Johnson who created the first modern English dictionary to Noah Webster who created the first American English dictionary and advocated some reforms…some of which stuck (e.g. plow vs plough). The chapters cover other major figures including Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt and others. Many have really, really tried, but usually with limited success.

The story ends with one mechanism which may actually cause reform to happen – the Google spell checker. The difference between Google and other efforts is that Google treats spelling like a socially defined convention. In English, most people spell the dark period after day as “night”, but maybe you also want “nite”. Google pulls up both if its database think they are alternate spellings. Wolman also notes the tactful way Google gives a suggested correction. Google never says yells or gives an error if you type “frend” instead of “friend”, but merely asks “Did you mean ‘friend’? when you type “frend”. Usually the answer is “Uh…yeah”, but it’s a relief Google doesn’t make fun of you or mutter under its breath about the decline of the English language.

And interestingly, …you may really mean “frend” either as an obscure word (e.g. the FREND spacecraft arm or director Charles Friend) or even as a check to see if speakers are using “frend” as an alternate spelling of “friend” (they are). Wolman argues that Google was instrumental in persuading some spelling authorities that spelling “r(h)ubarb” would not cause the end of the world, and might be…acceptable.

Ending with Google is interesting because spelling or any writing is really an arbitrary set of conventions…which people like to mess with for purposes of establishing linguistic identity. This is why the Pan Celtic word for three – /tri(:)/ is spelled as trí in Irish, trì in Scottish Gaelic (see the accent flip) tree in Manx, but just tri in Welsh and try in the modernized Cornish spelling system (Heaven forbid the European languages use the same spelling system).

In the end though, why shouldn’t Google decide? It’s much more democratic, and probably will have more acceptance than anything an official panel will decree. And it will be gradual enough to please those attached to the old forms. Nothing rouses outrage so much as a full-blown replacement of “corrected forms.” English spelling will probably be never fully “fixed”, but it would be nice if there were a better way to tame it.

My Rating

I would say a 4 out of 5. Ironically, I would have liked more discussion of some of the quirks of English spelling. Not so much to maintain them, but to help current speakers understand what is going on (hint: it’s usually a question of language origin plus some sound shift rules).

On the other hand, I am happy with any book from a non-linguist who understands that language is not made of up grammatical decrees.

I ran into an interesting colloquialism listening to an interviewer from a miner turned federal mine inspector. In this quote she refers to miners needing to educate themselves on mine safety:

Each one of us needs to make ourself more knowledgable.

That’s right – the reflexive “ourself” is singular even though it’s a second person plural pronoun. This was a new one for me, but actually consistent with other aspects of spoken grammar. As you might guess, this is not “correct grammar”, but actually within this dialect perfectly correct. Examining the sentence, you notice that the speaker is using a distributed plural meaning that each member acts individually, hence on his or her own (or in colloquial English…”on their own.”

I am reasonably confident that if the speaker had said “We have to work together to make ____ knowledgeable”, the pronoun would probably have been “ourselves”.We rarely distinguish this in formal English except sometimes in singular/plural direct objects:

The team members need to bring their trophy (“trophy” singular).
The team members need to bring their uniforms (“uniform” plural)

But spoken English is more subtle about the distinction. Another example on the Web was “Then we will have to do it on our own/by ourself.” Of course, this was immediately corrected by a grammar expert. But interestingly, the first speaker was quite perplexed as to why one couldn’t use “by ourself.”

I have to admit that my grammar has a singular “themself” which specifically refers to an unknown individual (replacing the more cumbersome “himself or herself”). My grammar also has singular “they” instead of the formal “him or her” as well as singular “their” replacing “his or her”. As in:

Anyone who looks at themself (himself/herself) on camera all day will be concerned about appearance.
Anyone living away from parents will eventually have to do their own laundry.

When I write, I am careful to use the plural consistently so that I can use true plural “they” (since I refuse to default to “himself”). However, the more precise grammar is the spoken grammar which distinguishes distributed plurals (members acting independently) from plurals in which members act collaboratively.

Royal “Ourself”

There is an official version of “ourself” defined in Merriam-Webster which is the reflexive of the Royal We used by a monarch. So if the monarch wishes to dine alone, he/she (or they) might say “We will dine by ourself this evening.” However, I am not sure that the Royal We is used much in current English. Even the Queen of England in interviews appears to refer to herself as “one” rather than any first person.

A few decades ago, scholars wondered if being connected via a common set of TV programs (and now YouTube and the Internet) would level out dialectal differences. I was always skeptical, and the evidence is leaning against it. For instance, one of the episodes of the PBS miniseries Do You Speak American? shows how California is developing into its own dialect area.

Acronym Variations

But the proliferation of new tech words (or tech neologisms) shows how differences can arise. For instance today in a class I’m teaching, I discovered that “Web 2.0” had two variant pronunciations – “Web 2 point 0” and “Web 2 0” (no “point”). One student further intoned that dropping the “point” was much hipper (interesting).

Another one with variant pronunciations is “SQL” (structured query language) which I was taught as “S Q L”, but others as “Sequel”. The most interesting one may be “RSS” because no one can remember what “RSS” stands for – either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It doesn’t matter though because the lexical entry is now RSS /arɛsɛs/.

Maybe this shouldn’t surprise us because so many tech words are introduced to us from print resources. Even if we get to a YouTube source, I suspect that most of us see these terms online in a blog, tech review, documentation, listserv or e-mail. These don’t normally come with pronunciation guidelines (or if they do, they’re best guesses). That is, programmers may invent new acronyms, but they rarely publish pronunciation guidelines. The only way to get an “authentic” pronunciation would be to hear a presentation from a development team.

What’s that gadget?

Another source of confusion may come gadgets with no official name like this one below:

A flash drive/jump drive/USB drive/keychain drive. Image courtesy Fredo Alvarez. Licensed by Creative Commons.

This thingamabob is known as a jump drive/flash drive/USB drive/thumb drive depending on the speaker. Actually the first time I saw it it was described as a neat device that plugged into a USB drive and that you could put on your keychain. So for me, it became a “keychain drive” (and apparently for other people as well – although I think I am the lone “keychain driver” speaker at Penn State.)

Surprisingly, I don’t recall any major marketing campaigns for this – word of its existence seemed to spread by word of mouth. These are the circumstances which could promote multiple variants, but it really is amazing how many developed in such a short period of time (since about only 2002 or 7 years).

Although we are connected by media, apparently we don’t always use it to propogate “official” usage information. In fact, in the new age of Facebook/texting/Twitter/YouTube/multiple cable channels, I would predict that more variations will evolve over time. Unlike 50 years ago, we can’t assume that a large segment of Americans will be watching the same show (e.g. I Love Lucy) because there are so many more options. Despite the ubiquity of these technologies, they are actually serving to Balkanize us at the moment.

The difference may be that not all communities will be geographically contiguous – we’ve seen this somewhat before (e.g. educated people speaking Latin or French across Europe), but I don’t think on the scale we’re seeing now.

One Sunday night after I watched the specials on Air Force One (the presidential jumbo jet) and Marine (the presidential helicopter fleet), I ended up watching a special on the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan.

While the other two specials were somewhat serious programs on what goes into protecting and transporting the president, I was struck at how humorous much of the carrier jargon was. The list of terms I remember were

• Ouija board – a replica of the decks with all the planes on the decks. They are moved on the board as planes land, takeoff or go into maintenance.
• Grape – a member of the aviation fuel crew who are designated with purple jerseys
• Knee-Knocker – It’s the part of the plating between the floor and the lower part of the hatchway. If you don’t pay attention, you will knock your knees over the hatchway

We normally military jargon with arcane acronyms (e.g. “CJCS” aka Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff) and terms like “campaign, friendly fire, tactical air support” which abstract away from the fact that the goal and result of combat is usually destruction.

But terms like these show the other side of the military as a bunch of people just trying to make it through the day and aware of the irony of the military lifestyle. Other terms I have heard in my day include the immortal FUBAR (“…beyond all recognition”), BUF (the B-52 bomber called the “Big Ugly Fella” or something else) and GIB (the weapons system officer on a combat plane or “guy in back”).

Behind every warrior who has been glorified or feared lies a very large support and cleanup crew.

An issue I don’t see discussed very often is how mathematical notation (e.g. =, +, -…) translates into spoken grammar. But in my day job as an instructional designer, I ran into an interesting sentence with an equation which my English grammar machine stop and say “Huh”?

The problem area was how to translate the equal sign. Normally, in a simple expression such as “2+3 = 5” or “A = l * w” (Area formula for a rectangle), the equals sign can be translated as “is equal to” or “equals” (a little raising into V position?). In any case, it is normally the generic present tense.

However, what happens if a sentence somehow introduces a different tense? The sentence I was working with introduced a conditional in the following scenario.:

The area formula for rectangles is A=l*w. Had the figure been a triangle, then A=1/2 b*h.

This didn’t work well for me because it translated to “Had the figure been a triangle, then A equals 1/2 b*h”, and in my grammar, I expect the result clause headed by “then” to use the conditional form (i.e. “then A would equal 1/2 b*h”).

Interestingly my solution was to introduce another verb to carry the conditional tense:

The area formula for rectangles is A=l*w. Had the figure been a triangle, then the formula would be A=1/2 b*h.

The phrase “the formula would be” introduces the noun “formula” which, indicates to watch for an equation, and then the conditional “would be”. Now the equal sign is no longer the “main verb”, but an embedded verb which can participate in a copula structure (i.e. the formula is A = 1/2 b*h). My grammar does allow present tense once the conditional has been introduced (here the present indicates “simultaneous with” rather than “right now”).

The original sentence (written by another person) leads me to ask several questions on how it got written in the first place. Does the author also have a tense condition like I do or does the author allow present tense in result clauses? Alternatively, is this a construction that’s a sign of math instructor jargon, or was it something inserted without reading how it would sound (it happens).

Some interesting questions to ponder:

As most linguists will tell you, most spoken forms, even the colloquial or dialectal forms that your writing instructor tells you not to use – just not ones that are documented on paper. Ironically, the grammar of these forms are hard to nail down because in colloquial speech, it’s rare that they are used ungrammatically (that is in a way that people don’t understand). To make it worse, it’s hard to find informants who are willing to admit that they use the construction and are willing to sit down to run through weird linguistic tests.

Occasionally though, someone does make a mistake – either through irony or sometimes through imitating a form he or she doesn’t really know. And then, you get an insight!

Take the case of “generic you” …

Generic you is when you use the second person singular to mean “anyone” as in ‘You always eat turkey at Thanksgiving in the U.S.!’

In written English, the use of “one” is preferred, as in:

Generic you is when one uses the second person singular to mean anyone as in “One always eats turkey at Thanksgiving.

People object to generic you partly because they feel that it’s not semantically logical (as if that really counts in grammar). But as this blog post from Mr Kyle notes, it is very common in modern English.

As Mr Kyle alludes, many people use “you” when they really mean “I” (as in “You get depressed when work on a dissertation all day and really begin to look forward to the Martha Stewart show “). But generic you and “I” are not actually interchangable – there is a restriction.

Specifically, “you” only works in contexts when a speaker means “me and anyone else in my hypothetical situation.” If the context is so specific that the situation describes ONLY THE SPEAKER then generic you is ungrammatical. Mr Kyle actually has a few of these as ironic “examples” of how to use this construction (they are meant to sound totally silly…and they do.)

1. *You enjoyed answering these questions
   = I (Mr Kyle) enjoyed answering these questions
2. *You wish you all good luck.
   = I (Mr Kyle) wish you all good luck
3. ?You’d like some pancakes – this won’t work if a waiter is taking your order, but can work if you are narrating a story about someone in search of breakfast treats.

Thus the following advice is not accurate (Mr. Kyle will be crushed)

How do I do [refer to myself in the second person]?

Easy. When referring to yourself, simply replace the word “I’ with the word ‘you’. For example, if asked what you’d like for breakfast, instead of, “I’d like some pancakes”, respond, “You’d like some pancakes.”

It really should be more like:

How (and when) can you do refer to yourself in the second person?

Easy. Place your sentence in a context which can apply to both you (as speaker) and to other people. If the situation only applies to you (as speaker), you cannot use this construction and must switch to first person.

As silly as this discussion sounds, it is important to note a principal which is that speakers don’t realize how complicated speaking is. Language (vs. good writing) seems very easy because we do it everyday (and use constructions like generic without thinking about things like “context”), but when you actually try to describe it, it is amazingly tricky stuff.