Kids & Conlangs & Can Adults write Conlangs?
Conlangs and Children. There are several stories about kids and language that make me think adults can’t invent a language, or at least, they can’t *finish* a language.
- Nicaraguan deaf children spontaneous forming a new sign language
- children born to parents who don’t sign well, but learn to use it better than either parent
- pidgin becoming creoles
The ability to spontaneously create a language that works (and is at the creole level and not a pidgin level) is limited to kids.
Clumsy Encoding
In my groundless and undeveloped theory, a conlang is at best us speaking our natural language with some encoding. Children’s brains are uniquely able to take a constructed language an encode it’s rules into their brain so that they are speaking it and thinking in it.
I think even skillful linguists are probably doing word for word encodings with a few layers of mechanical transformations. The more tranformative gymnastics one can do the more talented a linguist one is.
Adults Learning Second Languages
A natural language is complete– at some point a child leaned the language and fixed any deficiencies in it’s grammar (not because they are master analytical linguists but because that is how the human brain is wired). They provide the model for other future speakers. A first generation conlanguage can’t do that.
I think this is different from adults learning other natural languages. Those other natural languages were at one point learned by the minds of children. That gives us adults learning a 2nd language a proper model. When a language has only been invented by and adult, the model doesn’t exist yet.
Any Hope for Hobbyists?
The book I just read by R L Trask pointed out that some of the rules of English have taken hundreds of years to formulate analytically, i.e. in a way that doesn’t require a fluent speaker standing around to say, “yeah, that sounds right” and accounts for everything that does sound right to a fluent speaker.
When a rule is ill defined in the artificial language, the speakers parent language will bleed into the grammar of the artificial language.
Short of a revolution in the way we formulate rules for natural languages, we will continue to have a hard time to formulate rules for artificial languages except for these cases:
* The designer doesn’t care about parent language bleed-in.
* When parent language bleed-in is okay because the language is a relex, sophisticated pigden, euro-clone, etc.
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