“The woman — identified as Rochom P’ngieng, 27 — does not speak any intelligible language, according to Sal Lou, a village policeman who said he is her father.”
If she left human society at the age of 8, she certainly spoke intelligible language up until then. So what’s with the aphasia?
Does it mean that language is use it or lose it? If use of language is essential to our definition of ourselves as human, then so is human social contact. Or who knows what else might have caused her aphasia… I’m just wondering about language loss. I’ve read lots of linguistics about language acquisition, but not the reverse. Having studied lots and lots of languages, I let some of them lapse out of practice for a long time while I concentrate on others. Then I lose fluency, but it can be regained with enough practice. However, it’s hard to imagine loss of the language faculty itself from disuse.
Stands With A Fist: It has been a long time since I made the talk.
Kicking Bird: I want you to try.
Stands With A Fist: I can’t. I can’t, it is dead in me.
You might want to check out FeralChildren.com. It has stories of lots and lots of people who have spent their youths separated/secluded/isolated from society. A common feature of the stories, even if they acquired language before losing contact with other humans, seems to be losing language skills. Some re-acquire those skills, but frequently never become fully fluent.
I see they already have a brief blurb on Rochom P’ngieng. I expect it will be updated as more is discovered, if her case is documented.
The last time I spoke English daily was in March 2003. Now I’ve been doing it since November 2006. I have read and written it during that same period so my vocabulary hasn’t slid perceptibly but I know my accent is worse and sometimes I use constructions that when I reread them leave me saying “ohmyGod, I can write better than that!”
After four years living in Miami, sometimes I had problems remembering a word in Spanish or I’d use the Cuban word rather than the neutral-Spanish or Navarrese one. My family got a lot of laughs from that!
So I’m not surprised that someone who hasn’t had a conversation in 19 years doesn’t remember how to do it, no.
I also meant to mention that FeralChildren.com has a section on development (language acquisition, physical development, psychological) on the right menu. The most pertinent one is probably on the critical period of language acquisition.
It’s not that unusual to forget how to speak your native language. Remember the character played by Mary McDonnell in Dances with Wolves? She was the white woman captured as a child by Indians and, by the time she encounters Costner’s character, she’s almost forgotten how to speak English. The McDonnell character is, of course, fictional, but the language loss is based on fact - I’ve read a number of 19th century accounts of other white captives who forgot their native tongue.
Immediately following the Great War, a lot of British Tommies married mamselles and settled in France. In the late 1930s, the British Army pension department sent inspectors to France to to interview the ex-pat vets to find out how many were still alive and to verify identities. The inspectors discovered that, in the 20 or so years since the war ended, many of the ex-soldiers had largely forgotten how to speak English. The inspectors sometimes had to employ translators to speak to the English vets.
My husband is German. Cousins of his, a pair of brothers, emigrated from Germany to California in the early 1950s. They were in their 20s when they left Germany and they married American girls. When my husband went to visit his cousins in 1975, he found they’d all but forgotten how to speak German.
I would have thought that in isolation people would talk to themselves (out liud) just to hear a human voice. I would have thought that would be sufficient to keep the skill from being lost. This is startling.
<< At his first coming on board us, he had so much forgot his Language for want of Use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seem’d to speak his words by halves. >>
You’re assuming she is psychologically and psychiatrically normal. There are a number of ways she could have become unable to speak intelligibly, including stress, psychosis, and brain damage from trauma, toxins, etc.
I don’t have a cite but I’ve heard many references to spies who went through language immersion for years at a time and had to use translators and language classes to talk to people when they returned home.
Quite the opposite, in my experience. As a seminarian, I took many silent retreats. After only 3 days, not only you don’t miss talking but you kind of resent hearing a human voice when you are forced to hear someone. After a week you just don’t feel the need to talk at all and try to avoid it once you are free to talk again. Although I knew some people felt differently, the majority of people in those retreats felt the same way.
I also have a couple of friends who reported similar experiences when doing long train trips in countries where they didn’t know the language.
And I spent my junior year abroad in Germany, and towards the end of that time I found that my English was getting a bit sticky. Even though I was one of a large contingent of Americans, all from the University of California, we often used German among ourselves, or sometimes a weird kind of “Germlish” in which key words of English would be replaced by German ones. For instance, we’d say, “we had an Auseinandersetzung” instead of “we had an argument”.
While there and still immersed in German, at UCSD for the next year, I thought and dreamed in German, and never thought I would lose that capability, but I find it a great deal more difficult to do that now.
I just noticed this part of your OP. It’s not that feral children lose their faculty with language from disuse. It’s that many of them never had it to begin with or lost it for other reasons, whether they were abandoned because of mental retardation, or for the reasons Shoshana listed: abuse, malnutrition, etc. Sometimes the children are found after the critical period of language acquisition, and so while they may gain some ability with language, they never gain fluency, especially if they weren’t exposed to language before going feral. The stress of being taken from social groups they were secure in (like if they were raised by monkeys or wolverines or whatever) and being plunged suddenly into human society can also hinder learning.
I assumed that Rochom spoke like a normal 8 year old before disappearing, which is what made me wonder about language loss, or if that’s really what it was, like Shoshana listed some other possible causes for aphasia. (You forgot being too stoned to talk.)
Rochom is from Ratanakiri Province. That’s the bit of Cambodia in the far northeast tucked up between Laos and Vietnam. The name comes from Sanskrit ratna giri, ‘Jewel Mountain’. It’s a highland area remote from any major population centers, true to its name it has gem mines, the majority of Ratanakiri’s population is non-Khmer minority tribes. It borders on a part of Vietnam where the Montagnards live. It has a deep blue volcanic crater lake and ecotourism for having various ethnic tribes: the Tampuan, Krung, Jarai, Kachok, and Brao/Kavet. Rochom’s family is of the Pnong people, “who normally are not members of any organized religion, but instead are animists who revere nature.”
To think that if it hadn’t been for this story, I might have lived out my life and never found out about such a cool place. I’ve been to highlands of Southeast Asia and love that environment very much.
Up in the hills of Ratanakiri is a secret hollow where the milk-carton kids hang out. They have rediscovered the art of flint knapping and have stone knives for hairstyling. In fact, she had several friends who were learning the art and she let them practice on her. But she has promised not to reveal the existence of the feral kids’ clubhouse.
Well, someone suggest a more plausible scenario, then!
