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pmoriarty · 2022-04-25 · Original thread
"Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language"

Oliver Sacks wrote a great book about this: Seeing Voices[1]

In it he writes about all sorts of people who either never learned language or learned it late in life, and about what that transformation from a non-linguistic world to a linguistic world is like.

Highly recommended.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Voices-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0375704...

pmoriarty · 2017-04-08 · Original thread
This reminds me of the story of Kaspar Hauser[1] (which was made in to a movie by Werner Herzog[2]) and of the fascinating book Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks.[3]

In his book, Sacks investigates various cases of children growing up without language, how they cope (or don't cope) with it, how they finally acquire language (if they do), and how differently they see the world in both the pre-linguistic and post-linguistic states. Hauser was one of the most famous cases of this sort, Helen Keller[4] was another.

Reading this book inspired me to learn sign language, which I expected to be radically different from spoken and written language, and more powerful in many ways, as you can physically describe things in ways that has little parallel to spoken and written languages.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_hauser

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enigma_of_Kaspar_Hauser

[3] - https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Voices-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0375704...

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_keller

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