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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 va

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).

quant18 17y ago
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 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8
- gruseom 17y ago
  Huh, the lengths some people will go to for content. The original page did seem suspect.
gruseom 17y ago
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.
- charlesju 17y ago
  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.
  - quant18 17y ago
    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).
cameldrv 17y ago
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?

quant18 17y ago

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 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8

gruseom 17y ago
Huh, the lengths some people will go to for content. The original page did seem suspect.

gruseom 17y ago

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.

charlesju 17y ago
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.
- quant18 17y ago
  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).

cameldrv 17y ago

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?