Posted on 04/30/2013 2:41:40 PM PDT by AtlasStalled
"Unclaimed," a new documentary premiering at Toronto's Hot Docs film festival on Tuesday night, tells the story of Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, who was shot down over Laos in 1968 and was long presumed dead.
The documentary actually follows fellow Vietnam vet Tom Faunce, who heard about Robertson's whereabouts while on a humanitarian mission and wants to find him. Faunce does track down someone claiming to be Robertson in a remote village in south-central Vietnam.
* * *
Whether or not the man is indeed Robertson remains unproved. But, as the Toronto Star puts it, the film "makes a compelling case."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I don’t know about totally losing the ability to speak English, but your language skills do degrade if you don’t use them.
Wasn’t it, “Me rove you rong time.”
Interesting. Others in this thread have made similar comments, but I think all said they were removed from their native environment as children. Robertson was 28 when he disappeared. Don't know whether that makes a difference or not...???
All I have to do is see Si and I start laughing. :-)
I call BS. It has been 12 years since I took German in High School and yet I still remember some of it. That was only 6 months of light lessons. A native language would be so etched into your brain that you would remember most if not all of it.
Hmmm... I’ve known “shut-ins” whose isolation prevents them from talking to other people much and who have actually complained of such... They can’t remember certain words and when talking often seem to cast around for the right word longer than most people their age. I’ve always attributed it to the sort of normal memory degradation people go through plus, perhaps, a little onset dementia... But maybe you guys are onto something here. Wow, you’d think certain things would never leave you, but I guess not! I better join a Bridge club and start going every day — immediately!
After a couple years in Quebec, I came home speaking English like a French-Canadian immigrant. You don't lose English; it just gets rusty from disuse.
And now, some 4 decades later, to a Quebecker, I'd sound like an American immigrant speaking really obsolete seventies slang.
Tabarnouche!
Exactly.
And by '97 or so, we were all swabbed for DNA...
If he spent the last forty years far outside the major metropolitan areas, and never had reason to speak or hear English, then yes, he could have lost the facility to actually speak it.
As far as actually forgetting his native tongue entirely, I think that's a stretch.
As to losing ones accent, that's also hard to do, unless a person is immersed in an area where they're the only one around who has that accent. I can remember when I was a kid, that non-native Hispanic folks didn't have as strong of a Spanish accent as they do today. In my observation, that's because there weren't as many native Spanish speakers around to reinforce their native accent.
Today, I know grown Hispanic adults who were raised in this country, who have distinct Spanish accents. You never used to hear that decades ago.
Hey! Jack!
Thanks!
Hello friend, you are a breath of sanity, thanks!
U numma won GI
You would think. But here in my northeast US city I saw an American develop a Cambodian accent when speaking English and not because he spoke Khmer at the home of his girlfriend. He knew basic words in Khmer but I spoke much more khmer than he did and had many Cambodian friends. My English accent, however, was not influenced in that way. I think the reason for that was that I had a family (mom, dad and brother) to go home to everyday while he never knew his dad and had little (if any) to do with his mom.
But still, it's hard to believe that an America living in USA could develop such an accent. But he did.
Like the Cambodian immigrants he would not pronounce the "s" at the end of plural nouns - things like that which would be impossible to fake.
He would have likely thought in English. He would have had to have been there since the age of 5 years old or younger to forget his English and even at 5 years old there would still be a little left. Much of it depends on his age when he went there.
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