[xmca] Ildefonso

["Eijck, M.W. van" <m.w.v.eijck@tue.nl>]

XMCAers,

Have you heard about Susan Schaller's story of Ildefonso, A Man Without Words?

http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=200

It is a story absolutely stunning! Read it if you want to know more about a mind interacting with the world without any linguistic tools. It reads like a kind of weird Vygotskyan experiment.

Ildefonso started learning a language only when he was 27 years old. Although a challenge, he managed to learn it quite well. And then there is something intriguing:

"Where he gets lost is especially with too many references to time in one sentence. He can't handle too many tenses in one sentence. But he can handle more than one reference and he can handle any amount of information. He did learn language. The few problems he has are nothing compared to not having language. 
     But the second thing is the psychological slash philosophical things with language. He says he thinks differently. However, there are a few things he doesn't think differently about. I try to meet him once a year and I always ask him, "When was the last time we saw each other?" I ask him a "when" question because it tickles me. Time was the hardest thing for him to learn. And he always prefers to say "the winter season" or "the Christmas time." He wants to point to a season or to a holiday. It's not a cognitive problem. To this day, he thinks it's weird that we count time the way we do. He can do it, but he doesn't like it. Think about it. For twenty-seven years, he followed the sun. He followed cows. He followed the seasons. It's that rain-time of the year."

His problems with time remind me of the notion of a chronotope, which Bakthin considered underpinning the structure of the narrative. Also Ricœur states that narrative is always unfolding in terms of time and, vice versa, time is always thought narratively. Hence can't we assume that inherent to learning a language is the construction of a notion of time? What do you think?

Cheers,
Michiel

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