The name/word problem was frightening. I was isolated as it was. The thought that I wouldn't be able to learn new words as needed was unbearable.
I consider my solution my greatest achievement. It came in three steps.
The first step came to me when I remembered having seen a crude picture of a cat. I drew a copy of it in sand outside, with a stick. Looking at it, I suddenly realized that the picture was standing for cats in general to me. The word "cat" still could not be anything but the name of one cat, but the picture could do the work of a general word.
The second step, and to me the one that was brilliant -- I'll never be this smart again, ever -- was to think, "Why don't I let the word 'cat' be the name of the picture?"
It was a little awkward. When hearing the word "cat" I would have to recognize it as the name of a picture in my memory, and then that picture would refer to the general class of animals being referred to, and I could proceed to use the picture to organize my thinking about what was being said, and when it came time to say something about the creatures referenced by the picture, I could just use the name ("cat") for the picture, and no one would need to know the extra steps involved.
I would seem slow, because the process would take longer than normal speech processes, but it was better than not being able to learn new vocabulary, and being totally cut off from social intercourse.
The third step came when I encountered a relatively abstract word I didn't recall knowing before, and I realized it would be very difficult to assign a picture to it that wouldn't be arbitrary. I don't remember the word now, but suppose it was "arbitrary". What would you picture to represent the concept "arbitrary?" Pretty much anything I can think of would be easily mistaken for something else.
What I needed was what we call in the math biz a canonical method for generating new pictures. I wanted a machine, in effect, that I could use to crank out pictures without having to go to all the trouble of inventing new pictures out of thin air for each new word.
It happens my parents were both readers. I hadn't started to learn to read yet. My mother had tried to get me interested by reading children's books to me, but I was into memorizing them and reciting them along with her reading. My memory had always been too good to need to learn to decipher the chicken scratches on the page.
But as I was pondering the problem of coming up with new pictures I had a flash of insight. I ran to my Mother to test the idea I was having. I said, "Mommy! Is there writing for every word you can say?" "Of course, silly." "Every word? Even words I don't know yet?" "If it's a word you can say, you can write it down."
That was the final step then. I could get my parents to show me the writing for each new word. That would be the picture that would constitute the actual word for me. The written form would represent the concept that ordinary people used the sound to signify. For me, the sound of the word would be the name of the written form, by which I could reference the concept.
In speaking and listening I taught myself to imagine English written subtitles under every scene -- and I'd never seen a subtitled film! We didn't have a television, and I'd never been to a movie of any kind.
It wasn't hard to learn. I had it down in a few days. At first, it was painfully slow, and people began to say I spoke to slowly, and get impatient with me. I had to do it consciously. The process was similar to speaking in English through translation back and forth from another language without other people knowing.
No comments:
Post a Comment