When Ildefonso gained language, he lost the part of him that was able to communicate with his friends who were in the same situation. Gaining language opened up an entirely different world for him. He now knew that objects had names and learned how to communicate through signing. Having language also changed his way of thinking. Now with this voice in Ildefonso's head, it broke the silence he had before and there was no going back.
In the podcast, Ildefonso was asked if he had kept in contact with his old friends and he explained that he could no longer communicate with them, leading him to lose touch with them. The language he had in his head did not allow him to go back to his old forms of communications. He remembers a conversation he was having with his friends that took them forty-five minutes to get the story of a bullfight across. Ildefonso explains that he can't talk to them that way anymore.
Personally, I think that language was necessary for Ildefonso to grow as an individual. If he hadn't, he would have spent his entire life not knowing how to communicate or that there was such a thing as language; he would have missed out on recognizing the beauty of language. He probably would have never gotten out of his circle of friends, which is not necessarily a bad thing if he was happy with them. It's hard to tell whether he could think before he had language. Ildefonso clearly knew when he felt hunger or pain, but I want to imagine that somehow he could think. In other words, I think that he did have opinions about other people and thought about the things that he saw.
Ultimately, I think that gaining language was a good thing for Ildefonso because communication greatly improved his life. I believe that the pros of learning language outweighed the cons in Ildefonso's life.
I agree with you that he needed to learn language to grow as a person and it greatly improved his life. However, he would still communicate with his friends in the way that they would act things out. He could not speak, but he could still see these pictures in his head of what he thought that different things were. Just like Dr. Taylor. She was unable to speak, but when asked certain questions such as; "who is the president of the united state?" she would find a way to picture what both a president and the united states look like and make out what exactly what they were asking her.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you on the fact that he needed language to grow as a person. However, I don’t think it would have been the end of the world had he not learned language at all. For all we know, before Susan come along, Ildefonso was completely content with his life and “language.” He would not have spent his whole life not knowing how to communicate because amongst his circle of friends, they could communicate. I agree that he would never know what actual language was, but then again, it might not have mattered to him. He didn’t actually know what he was missing out on, he didn’t know if he was missing out on anything at all really. So had he never been exposed to the language we speak, he wouldn’t know any better. Ildefonso would have never experienced real language. In our eyes, we see this as missing out on language. He would have missed out on being able to communicate with us, but again he wouldn’t have known any better. Not being able to communicate with us wouldn’t affect him because he didn’t know any better. Language did help Ildefonso grow though, he was able to open up and experience what it was like to communicate and think and understand the communication.
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