5/8/24, 9:34 AM All Language Was Foreign - The New York Times 5/8/24, 9:34 AM All Language Was

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All Language Was Foreign
By Lou Ann Walker
Feb. 3, 1991
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Ms. Schaller, fascinated, was determined to make linguistic contact with him. She
succeeded; the man suddenly connected "cat" -- the picture, the sign and the written
word. And he was hungry for more. For her, Ildefonso's breakthrough was every bit as
exciting as Helen Keller's discovery of water at the well.
In essence Ms. Schaller's book, "A Man Without Words," is a meditation on the wonders of
language. Without language, there is no way to understand the passage of time. Ildefonso
had no idea what a birthday was. In order to get to work on time he memorized how the
face of the clock looked. Ms. Schaller began to realize how crucial language is in the
organization of our inner selves, how it influences our perceptions about the world. To
teach adjectives, the author began with colors. When she hit the color green Ildefonso
was horrified. Eventually Ms. Schaller realized that, for Ildefonso, green represented the
immigration officials who frequently captured him -- the color of their trucks and
uniforms, even the green card he didn't have. Without language, the color came to
symbolize all that was frightening. Without some language system, some explanation,
history and geography cannot be comprehended unless one has lived every moment in
time and traveled every foot of ground. There isn't even a way to illuminate the concepts
of deafness and hearing.

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A MAN WITHOUT WORDS By Susan Schaller. Foreword by Oliver Sacks. 203 pp. New
York: Summit Books.
A human being without language would seem to be a 19th-century phenomenon; at least
that's what people tried to tell Susan Schaller. But one day in the late 1970's Ms. Schaller,
while working as a sign-language interpreter in Los Angeles, encountered a 27-year-old
deaf Mexican man who seemed bright and curious but who, as she quickly discovered,
had no language whatsoever. No sign language, no written or spoken Spanish or English.
The man, whom the author calls Ildefonso (a pseudonym), was an illegal alien who had
worked at a variety of jobs all over the United States but had somehow managed to get by
without knowing how to add or subtract or even how to tell time.
Seven years later, Ms. Schaller tried to re-establish contact with her student. Convinced
his was not a unique case, she searched for others like him as well. She discovered that
several teachers had worked with deaf people who had no language, many of whom were
from different cultures or who had astonishingly protective parents. She also pored over
studies of so-called wild children, consulted treatises on language such as "The Man With
the Shattered World" by A. R. Luria, and talked to the physician and writer Oliver Sacks,
who urged her to continue her pursuit, and who ultimately wrote the foreword to this
book.
When Ms. Schaller finally finds Ildefonso, he is working as a gardener for a hospital in
Los Angeles and the proud holder of a green card. His gardens are characterized by order
and symmetry. He is an eager student, and his signing has advanced by light years. He
tells the author he now tries to find people to interpret the evening news for him. And he
has developed a philosophical bent from all those years of observing: "There is enough in
the world for everyone to have a little garden," Ildefonso tells Schaller. "Everyone could
be content. But some people want gigantic houses and gigantic gardens, so they fight and
steal and buy up all the land and others can't have anything."
Over dinner, Ildefonso tries to demonstrate how people without language communicate --
he has a younger brother, deaf, also without language. He wants to show the author what
his life was like before the miracle of language, but he is incapable of regressing to his
previous state. And so he takes her through back alleys to a tiny room where she
discovers a virtual lost tribe: people who have no language.

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5/8/24, 9:34 AM All Language Was Foreign - The New York Times

No one has a name here; introductions are really descriptions. And each person has
peculiar ideas about cause and effect in life. One has discovered that the number 1986
seems to satisfy authorities and believes that those shapes are endowed with magic. But
as the people tell stories, it can only be done through mime, each movement an invention.
One person might repeat a gesture but, as Ms. Schaller realizes, most communication is
trial and error. She witnesses a testament to how slow and painful the evolution of
language must have been.

Susan Schaller's book is a tantalizing glimpse into unexplored territory. It is frustrating

not to learn more about Ildefonso and his life in this slim volume, more about how he got
along every day and how his life changed once he acquired language -- and what happens
to all those members of the clan without language. Virtually nothing has been written
about adults without language, but Ms. Schaller makes it clear that their numbers are
greater than we think.

Lou Ann Walker is the author of "A Loss for Words," a memoir about growing up with deaf parents. She is at work on a
history of education of the deaf in the United States.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 7, Page 14 of the National edition with the headline: All Language Was Foreign

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