What made Helens learn to speak?
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Adjectives provide comparisons between things. She would already know about the things and could experience different ones of different sizes, textures, strengths and so on. The finger writing would provide words for such comparisons.
Her strong curiosity would get her to ask questions about things and how people feel about things and about one another. She would learn such things the way children do for the first time through trial and error attempts at communications.
Helen Keller had learned to speak before some illness resulted in her becoming blind and deaf, and this means that she would already have some primitive sense of language structure in her brain. It wouldn't take much beyond that for a willing learner to understand the basic concepts that the rest of us so easily put into language.
Of course colors would be a complete abstraction to her unless she remembered something about them from before her illness, but such memory seems unlikely.
Language and concepts build upon previous language and concepts. It's a process of constant refinement, and this doesn't work in a fundamentally different way for someone communicating by touch than someone communicating by sound.
Her strong curiosity would get her to ask questions about things and how people feel about things and about one another. She would learn such things the way children do for the first time through trial and error attempts at communications.
Helen Keller had learned to speak before some illness resulted in her becoming blind and deaf, and this means that she would already have some primitive sense of language structure in her brain. It wouldn't take much beyond that for a willing learner to understand the basic concepts that the rest of us so easily put into language.
Of course colors would be a complete abstraction to her unless she remembered something about them from before her illness, but such memory seems unlikely.
Language and concepts build upon previous language and concepts. It's a process of constant refinement, and this doesn't work in a fundamentally different way for someone communicating by touch than someone communicating by sound.
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