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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2936 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do you think it's possible to unlearn the ability to understand language? I remember reading a while ago that man left the modern world and went to live in the woods by himself or something like that and I think he stated that his sense of self essentially disappeared. I wonder if you spend enough time not speaking, reading or writing the English language just disappears from your mind.

I've saved this fascinating Reddit AskScience comment which I think is relevant. The hypothesis proposed there says that exposure to modern language during infancy is a core part of the development of basically the ability to think at all ("modern" here meaning any human language from the last 50k-ish years). If that's true, it would be impossible to reverse the changes brought by learning language, and thus probably impossible to really forget it.

Your abilities would certainly deteriorate, but not beyond the point where they couldn't be relearned if you came back to society. The Japanese soldiers who held out without surrendering for 20 years or more on remote Pacific islands are an example of this. The only way to get someone who doesn't have any concept of language and couldn't learn one is to deprive a child of exposure to language at the critical stages of their development.

Is it possible to forget how to speak one language or is it possible to forget how to speak any language? There are lots of stories of immigrants who forgot how to speak their mother tongues after moving to a new country as children.

Seems to me like a phenomenon exclusive to children. I strongly doubt that a healthy person who knows a language fluently at the age of 18 will ever forget how to speak it entirely until they die or succumb to dementia.

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