Talk:Nell

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The liguistic complaints about "Nell" seem complete, but they are not. For example, the writer deduces that there's three things we know about Nell's mother--that half her face is paralyzed, that she has had multiple strokes, and that she is aphasic. The writer then takes the partial paralysis and assumes that Nell's mother's aphasia is Broca's aphasia. But then the writer says these two things together doesn't "account for the resulting random sound omission in Nell's speech." At this point, the writer ignore the obvious, which is plainly stated 61-62 minutes into the movie by the Dr. Olsen character. "That's where the private language comes from -- it's twin speech." Nell had an identical twin, and twins tend to develop their own private language. That's why the play on which the movie is based was called "Idioglossia".

So, the movie accounts for all we find in Nell, although Dr. Olsen's methods and the way she reaches her conclusions are not very good linguistically speaking. So, the writer should fault Dr. Olsen's methods, but not the speech Nell came up with. It's twin speech based on how a mother talked with half her face paralyzed.

This is based on the linguistic complaints in the article "Nell", the article on "idioglossia", and on the movie "Nell".

67.72.98.89 04:48, 14 June 2006 (UTC)Charles Crossley, Jr.