milestone in kids learning English

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

I get to report a significant milestone in my kids learning English.  Avgust
has produced the first "productive" English sentence; i.e. he has for the
first time combined elements of the language in their proper grammatical
roles to create a sentence that he had not heard.  Angela, although a yerar
older, and with somewhat larger vocabulary, has not yet done so, though she
once did a phrase substitution of this sort using a Russian word to
substitute productively.

The context was the song from the popular children's educational show
"Barney", which starts off "I love you, you love me, ..."  He had finally
memorized this portion of the song and was repeating it at dinner, so I
explained to him what it meant, giving the Russian equivalents:
I love you, ya tebya lyublyu
You love me, ty menya lyubish

and pointing as I said the words so he knew the association of the pronouns
with the people involved.  I then repeated the pronouns with pointing, and then
repoeated the pairs of sentences, but giving the Russian translation in the
abnormal English matching order so he could see the word correspondences:

I love you, ya lyublyu tebya
You love me, ty lyubish menya

Surprisingly, he repeated it once and then IMMEDIATELY said:
I love Mama, ya tyublyu mamu
Mama love(s) me, Mama lyubit menya
(I'm not sure he put the 's' in, but he certainly had gotten the idea that
sumti (subject/object arguments) in the relationship could be freely
substituted.)

It bodes weel for Lojban that this is the first productive usage he has learned,
since the entire structure oof Lojban is built around ever more complex
varieties of just such simple substitutions of values for the sumti of
a relationship.

lojbab