The thing I find odd here is that you didn’t just draw it in the air with your finger or something, or describe it with a lot of more common words you did know. Plenty of ways to bypass occasional missing words.
(source: habit of learning about something cool in one language, then having to explain it in another)
In the whistle case, I was specifically being asked to name the object as part of a lexical inventory to evaluate how much of a deficit I was running; the point was to come up with the word “whistle.” In the wheelchair case, I would generally bang on the wheelchair I was in and say “this thing.” The issue wasn’t that I was unable to communicate, the issue was that I’d lost access to perfectly common words. Hope that clarifies matters.
Similarly, people understand me perfectly well when I not conjugate sentence properly, but is still frustrating when I know is wrong but cannot say right.
The thing I find odd here is that you didn’t just draw it in the air with your finger or something, or describe it with a lot of more common words you did know. Plenty of ways to bypass occasional missing words.
(source: habit of learning about something cool in one language, then having to explain it in another)
In the whistle case, I was specifically being asked to name the object as part of a lexical inventory to evaluate how much of a deficit I was running; the point was to come up with the word “whistle.”
In the wheelchair case, I would generally bang on the wheelchair I was in and say “this thing.” The issue wasn’t that I was unable to communicate, the issue was that I’d lost access to perfectly common words.
Hope that clarifies matters.
Similarly, people understand me perfectly well when I not conjugate sentence properly, but is still frustrating when I know is wrong but cannot say right.