The man without words
Image: a still from the short documentary film A Man Without Words
A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast of the wonderful RadioLab program from WNYC Radio in New York (courtesy of the Science Show on ABC Radio National) which was all about the use and power of words.
The program featured the story of Susan Schaller, a teacher at a Community College in LA, who encountered a 27-year-old man called Ildefonso who had been born deaf and who had never been taught to use sign language. Her initial attempts to communicate with her student were frustrated — he would simply repeat or mimic anything said to him in sign language.
The ‘Eureka moment’ came when Schaller instead pretended to teach another ‘invisible’ student by giving instructions to an empty chair, then sitting herself in the chair and acting out the response of the student. After many days of this exhausting approach, the breakthrough finally came, quickly followed by a flood of tears.
Ildefonso had never experienced sound, so he simply had no idea of its existence. Consequently, until this moment, Ildefonso had never realised that everything has a name; that is, there is a corresponding word (or words) for everything.
As Schaller explains, the consequence of not having a ‘language’ is so profound as to be almost unimaginable. Words not only affect how we interact with the world around us, they even control our capacity to think and conceptualise our experiences. We need words not only to communicate with other people, but also to build our own mental concepts of the world, our experience of it, of who we are.
For someone who works with words in my professional life, it was both revelatory and humbling to try to imagine what it would be like to live without the concept of language.
You can find a podcast of the ‘Words’ program on the RadioLab website. Susan Schaller has also written a book about her experience called A Man Without Words.
