Minneapolis / St. Paul News Blog

The "English as Second Language" staff at Minneapolis schools are going to have their hands full in a few years with this kid.

A Klingon in kindergarten? Does NOT share toys well with others.

Excellent hall monitor skills, however.

That is true NaHQun. I see the linked article says his son was born 15 years ago.

wow, citypages sucks...

I am Klang. Son of d'Armond. Do not judge me until you have beheaded your enemy in battle...as I have.
Qapla!

I would love it if Mr. Speers came to see "A Klingon Christmas Carol" at Mixed Blood Theatre this year. We are a theatre that does nothing but translations (normally from other languages into English), and it seems that his linguistics studies and our own would give us something to talk about.

Question: Mr. Speers -- Were you the person featured in the documentary "Earthlings: Mostly Useless Bags of Water"? Or, was there another man who tried this same thing elsewhere?

There was a news article in St. Louis 10 years ago about a local couple who also only spoke Klingon to their 2 children (both under 5?). Been a while... Seems the State was called in and the children were taken into protective custody. The parents were "blue collar" workers - and trekkies, so they were treated differently than this "learned gentleman".

I remember reading an article from another linguist about Klingon and she said it was actually kind of a hard language.

Oh man, they ended the article with a VULCAN salutation? Come on.

How about something more Klingon, like "die well"?

"Antonie La Chappelle says:
Did anyone notice that the accompanying photo came from 'The Official STAR WARS Blog'?"

Wow, sucks to be you, nerd.

Matt - I noticed the same thing as Antoine about where the photo came from and thought it was really odd that a photo from a Star Wars blog was used.

And, the photo isn't of d'Armond Speers either.

Yep, I'm a nerd too :)

What a complete moron this fool is. This should be deemed a form of child abuse. Just when this poor kid is at an age where he can assimilate languages quickly and easily, an idiot parent squanders this important developmental opportunity on THIS absurdity. And why to make some dubious point about an aspect of a pseudo-science. Children's services should be called in.

In addition to the corrections offered by Dr. Speers, there are some items that deserve recognition:

1) The Speers family raised their son bi-lingually, not exclusively in Klingon. They are not residents of the Twin Cities (or Minnesota, for that matter).

2) Language acquisition is non-exclusive; i.e., contrary to the posts from Stuart and Reality, learning multiple languages actuality improves the overall ability to acquire language, much like cross-training in sports improves athleticism.
Studies of multilingual children have proven this and are used by the Esperanto Society as a plug for learning constructed languages in addition to traditional language courses. So, in fact, the Speers did their son a service.

3) Dr. Speers is a first-rate professional, as are the other Klingon experts who helped us on this project and linguists who consult on our mainstream applications. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with them.

Best regards,
Loring Harrop
General Manager
Ultralingua, Inc.

"would acquire it like any human language,"

Seems kind of self evident since it is a human language. It was constructed by humans for humans dressed up as fictional characters -- it's not an "alien language". And, in spite of the fact that it may be "a difficult language to learn", according to the the above specialist, it actually has more things in common with English and other Northern European Languages than a click language like the !Kung Bushmen use, for example.

While teaching your child Languages other than English isn't child abuse (yet, although it sounds like some of you want it to be), the fact that this guy thought Klingon wasn't a human language just proves even PhDs can be idiots.

"Klingon? Not Spanish, French, Mandarin? Not some gutteral genuflecting concoction from the deepest recesses of Borneo?"

Genuflecting? Really?

@Jo/e Noakes: When linguists say "human language", what they really mean to say is "natural language" - that is, one that arose and evolved naturally, i.e. not made up like Esperanto. Also to contrast it with computer languages, as in NLP (natural language processing).

Esperanto is not a made up language; there are entire databases being compiled of this pre-latin language. It was spoken and used as a pre-Italian language in that region of Europe. The language is still somewhat enigmatic, but words are being pieced together from fragments of pottery and other artifacts. Esperanto is a dead language but certainly not made up.
-Roommate of a computational linguist

Sandra:

What region of Europe would that be?

Ching wing

I had always thought, just from watching the shows and the occasional documentary about fans, that Klingon was mostly complete but not quite there yet. As in, you could have basic conversations in it about simple situations, but you would be missing a lot of the tools for discussing advanced abstract concepts and the more technial stuff like legal or medical jargon.

So I figure in the first 3 years of life, you would be able to cver most of it, but surely you would occasionally bump up against areas where there just were't any words to describe what you needed to.

And it's not jut the conversations you have directly with the kid, they learn a huge amount of launguage by listening to other people having more advanced converstaions, and this would be mostly missing.

So, although I'm not in the group who think this is child abuse (lol), I do think that once he switched to english, he would be a little behind the other kids, more so than if he had spoken japanese or esperanto.

Anyone know what the relative word counts are for english/swahili/esperanto/klingon ?

This article was poorly written.

Child abuse. Learning Klingon is not anything that will help any child of this age.

Sandra is probably thinking of Etruscan, not Esperanto.

Though some Esperantists point out its similarity to Provenc,al ...

When Sandra says Esperanto, I think she means Etruscan :)

Regarding native Esperanto speakers, have a look at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ErKbLL5WQ

Yes, lets ignore the guy with a doctorate in the field of linguistics and instead go with your knee jerk reaction to what was good and bad for his child.

* where "you" refers to anyone who thinks they know better than this guy.

If only there were a Klingon word for "loneliness"...

BF Skinner presumably experimented on his daughter for research as well...And Skinner was a pretty smart man.
I won't say that it's really child abuse but it is a poor defense to say it's not just because Mr Speers is educated.

So Speers is is a highly educated professional, a linguistic expert, so that makes this all right? Oh, I see now. Albert Spears was presumably a highly educated man too, so I guess that excuses him and all the other highly educated Nazi leaders. I really want to thank all you mentally retarded fuckheads for setting me straight.

While I'll admit that it certainly would have been more productive to speak a useful language like Spanish or French, or even a better made up language like Elvish (J.R.R. Tolkien was at least a Linguistics professor already), saying that this is child abuse is ignorant.

I could argue that teaching your kids to play hide and seek is a waste of their young years as well. Why play games when they could be learning things that will help them later in life? Because they're kids! It's okay to do fun things with kids and it won't ruin their lives forever.

quote:

Anonymous says:
This article was poorly written.

/quote

You win the thread.

So many brilliant minds here commenting....and not one can say for sure that somewhere in the universe someone isn't speaking kilingon or a pidgeon of it! Unlikely? U betcha! but not impossible! Also I would like to add that there are many people who speak Klingon in the world. I happen to know at least 100. This article made me think of the movie 'Big Fish'....I wish more fathers spent time talking to their children and teaching them languages even if it is klingon...

Why doesn't every parent just teach their kids their own version of mathematics? That would give them a great head-start in life.

Can't he get his child rights taken away for this? I doubt this influences the child in a positive way.

HAHAHAHAHA tv fucks people up...

Yes, this is old; yes, this is poorly written; yes, there are plenty of facts missing to placate the fools in the world who some how managed to figure out how to turn on their computers. None of this changes the fact that that what the father did was brilliant. Language learning facilitates wonderful functions in the brain and aides in expanding and using areas not normally used. This child will, with any luck at all, develop fantastic the skills with language and many other areas of study. I wish I'd grown up in a multilingual home instead of just studying them by myself. This father should be applauded.

Is it really that much different than all the kids in the US who grow up learning African American Vernacular Language (ebonics) as their primary and probably only language? Shouldn't that be child abuse too then? What about creole or cajun? I cringe every time I hear someone say "Lemme axe you sumpin".

I'll take this with a grain of salt. Anyone with a doctorate in linguistics know well that a child can learn multiple languages at that age. Hence, bilingual children. No doubt Mom was speaking English, as are most of the children the child is acquainted with. The children in kindergarten will thinks it's a hoot but, he'll be forced to speak the dominant language if he/she wants to be understood.
I am amused.
I understood my youngest brother's language quite well, as we all did in our family. He had Down's Syndrome, and until he had the skill to speak a little better, we had a family language. No one else got it, but we did! There's even a language term which covers these very situation.
I think it's a gas!

To assert that speaking Klingon to a pre-linguistic child is abuse of any kind is to not so much dip your toe in an ocean of stupidity as to dive in the deep end.

The human brain copes exceptionally well with pattern recognition right up until our deaths or becoming someone frightened by the concept of learning more than one language.

"Just when this poor kid is at an age where he can assimilate languages quickly and easily, an idiot parent squanders this important developmental opportunity on THIS absurdity. And why to make some dubious point about an aspect of a pseudo-science. Children's services should be called in."

You people who think it's child abuse for a parent to teach their child Klingon are idiots. Seriously. Using your logic you should take away all the kids who were subjected to those Baby Einstein DVDs - after all, it has been found to have been a useless activity. For that matter, do that for any parent who lets their child watch television at all or talks baby talk to them or teaches them silly songs.

Might as well arrest those incompetent parents and put them in foster care. Oh yeah...THAT would be helpful.

"Anonymous says:
quote:

Anonymous says:
This article was poorly written.

/quote

You win the thread."

He split the infinitive. He may have been worthy of the award if he'd said, "This article was written poorly". ;)

"or even a better made up language like Elvish (J.R.R. Tolkien was at least a Linguistics professor already)"

Actually, Klingon was designed by a linguist from UCSC. It was purposefully constructed to disobey rules of Universal Grammar, which all natural languages follow. The point of this experiment was to see if the child would be able to acquire a language that did NOT follow the rules of Universal Grammar. In fact, the child could not acquire Klingon like a natural language; on the other hand, the child had no problem acquiring the English he heard from his mother.

Anonymous of 11/19--

If so, that's not a very useful experiment. As Steven Pinker wrote in "Language Instinct", we already have plenty of natural experiments proving that a child will "learn" natural grammar whether raised with it or not.

Deaf kids who are raised in communities without a sign language have been known to invent one. The signs are derived from the crude pointing and hand-waving that their families use to try and communicate; the grammar is their own. If they can do that, I'm sure this kid can figure out how to use "qa'pla" and "gagh" in a proper Terran sentence.

Feeding anything to your child other than Baby Puree (tm) Brand baby foods is child abuse! People who live on farms should have their children taken away from them! Teaching your children anything other than English is abuse! Squaaaawkkk! Bwaaaak bwaaak bwaaaak! Gurgle! Idiots.

Teach your children everything you can. Absolutely everything. The magic of it is that in very short order, your children will know more than you do.

child abuse 

–noun mistreatment of a child by a parent or guardian, including neglect, beating, and sexual molestation.

can somebody tell me where "teaching your kid a random language" fits under this definition?
Just because Dr. Speers decided to teach his child Klingon does not make him a child abuser or and idiot, moron, fool, or any other rude unessasary words. It makes him different, and that is not exactly a bad thing! Sure it may never come in handy but its a cool thing to know. I know the average weight of a human brain! It my never come in handy but Hey its fun to know and can keep people entertained! So if the only thing you people can do in life is post rude comments about the way a man raised his kid then you all need to get lives and suck it. Personally, im glad the kid knows Klingon. you other retards out there are probably people who are jealous and out to make other people feel bad just to make you feel better.

~~**~~

This seems like as good a time as any to mention the motto of the Klingon Language Institute.

qo'mey poSmoH Hol

"language opens worlds"

To add to my previous statement: Even the father reveals his knowledge that this is not a language in the following quote:

"I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language"

If he had to test it then there was doubt his child would acquire the language. He knew what he was doing here, and it may have made his son a little slower than the rest of the class.

RE:That's no Language, it's a space station!

But the child wasn't deprived of a natural language, his mother spoke to him in English.

Ah Americas. The most judgmental culture in the world.

WHO CARES!!!

Kudos to "Anonymous" for logical deductions! I have an advantage: I know Dr. Speers, his wife, and his son. They all speak English. The son was never spoken to “only” in Klingon when a toddler. A misplaced modifier can raise pseudo-ethical questions when one doesn’t know the facts, nor English grammar well enough, nor possess the intellectual curiousity to ask for an interview or fact check before offering up condemnations. Ah, America and its unrestriced free speech, whether or not someone knows what he or she is talking about!

Space station, your pronouncements on what is and is not a language are debatable. Can you provide a test for "languageness" that doesn't exclude Klingon just because it's Klingon? By every definition I can think of, Klingon is most certainly a language. Unless you decide in advance that a constructed language doesn't count, in which case Esperanto would not be a language either. Nor would ASL, or to a small extent Modern Hebrew.

Klingon is even *officially* a language, if you accept the authority of the Library of Congress and the International Organization for Standardization. See http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php and scroll down to "tlh".

Codex said:

He split the infinitive. He may have been worthy of the award if he'd said, "This article was written poorly"

*sigh* "Eternity with nerds. It's the Pasadena Star Trek convention all over again."

"Dad" need an ass-whuppin.

But if children AREN'T taught this beautiful language, society may be deprived of its next generation of Klingon rap stars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HekpXSI-N_o

And that, my friends, would be a tragedy.

I'm pretty sure it's a bad idea to talk to your kid in any language that isn't your own, unless they're also getting it from their surrounding environemnt. It doesn't matter if it is Klingon or English, which also happens. A child can't acquire a language that is just phrases overlaid on someone's native language, which that child never hears. It is just wrong.

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Before we get started... Yes... I am a Star Trek Fan. I think Klingon is awesome. Thats really not the point I'm gunna make is.

Whether a "natural human" language or a "made up" language he is still excersiseing the childs mind. People scoff and say expirimentation on children is wrong. Where would we be as a people without expirimentation? It's one of the ways people learn is by trying new things. No lets not try new things. We should never have tried new things. Think of it... we could still be living in caves. It's not like the guy was turning his kid into a lab rat with wierd drugs and test tubes and stuff like that. All he did was teach his kid a language that isn't spoken by many people and probably won't be of much use to him. Its still kinda cool. I understand the kid heard English from his Mother and grew up to speak English fluently and was ultimatly ok. So what if learning Klingon IS frivolous. Isn't childhood full of all kinds of frivolity? Isn't that part of being a kid and in fact... part of being human? I think we'd all loose our minds without a little frivolity in our lives.

Abuse? ABUSE?!?!? How Fucking retarded can you Assholes be when you call it abuse? I remember when child abuse ment things that were truly abusive like say... balling up your fist and beating the shit out of your kid, striking him or her with various objects, burning them with cigarettes and the like. Abuse? Get a fucking life you uptight anal sons of bitches (or if you happen to be female we'll leave the "son of" part out and just reguard you as the bitches you clearly are). Its no good cocksmoking bastards like you that fucked up the laws to begin with. Because of people like you parents can now get in trouble for spanking their children. You know what that means? We got TONS of little asshole bastard kids growing up who never got thier ass whipped for misbehaving. In the Bible it says "spare the rod spoil the child". I'm arn't talking about beating them black and blue but corporal punishment is a time tested method of discipline that has been used throughout time in pretty much every culture I can think of and so far it has worked pretty well. Now watch out. Today our society has become so arrogant in their thinking that they know everything that suddenly we all know better then all the generations that came before us. No no lets not give the kid the ass whippin he deserves when he acts up lets talk nicely and ask him not to do it anymore. If thats all you ever do then why the hell should he learn to listen or behave? So now we have all these stupid ass people growing up who did not or are not recieving the proper discipline and they don't know how to act.

So in closing... those of you who call this man an idiot and scream abuse should all be taken out and horsewhipped. Hows that for abuse you punkass motherfucking overopinionated hoe ass pieces of shit.

Have a nice day.

P.S.
QAPLA'!!!

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I remember reading this story when it first came out. What a real piece of work this guy is. Unbelievable.