Experimenting on kids
by A Person | Published on November 19th, 2009, 5:05 pm | Life
MN Daily With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
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As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.
Although some of the things he’s done lead people to believe he’s a “Star Trek” fanatic, Speers said it’s actually a passion for language that attracts him to Klingon.
“I don’t go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions, I don’t wear the fake forehead,” he said. “I’m a linguist.”
Oh well, that's all right then.
Wired "I had a tremendously hard time talking to him about everyday things," Speers confesses. Klingon's vocabulary at the time was only about 2,000 words, and it lacked some crucial vocabulary, such as words for bottle and diaper.
So Speers found himself using "thing which is flat" for table. "Alec very rarely spoke back to me in Klingon, although when he did, his pronunciation was excellent and he never confused English words with Klingon words," Speers says. "But we did sing Klingon songs together." (A RealAudio file of Alec singing is at www.bigfoot.com/~dspeers/klingon/resources.htm.) "Eventually he stopped listening to me when I spoke in Klingon. It was clear that he didn't enjoy it, and I didn't want to make it into a problem, so I switched to English about two years ago."
I think he is a 'thing which is dorky'
