I believe that most of us would be able to agree that, as Juliet (from Shakespeare's play) put it,

 

 

 

"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

 

 

 

I have no intention of explaining this in the context of the play, but this is how I interpret it in a linguistic context.

 

 

 

For my example, I'm going to use the word for 'car'; the word for 'rose' is too similar in most languages. In English, obviously, the word for 'car' is 'car'; in French, it's 'voiture', in Japanese, it's 'kuruma' (sorry, my computer doesn't support Japanese characters). In Russian, it's 'ÃÆÃ

One theory is that memorys can be recalled upon via a cue, whether that cue be a certain smell, a song or yes maybe even a word. Upon activating that cue, the memory is recalled. For example, from personal experience there was a song i had liked as a child but had forgotten, hearing it again brought back memorys of when I used to listen to the song (being it singing along to it in the back of the car at the top of my voice, going to my swimming lesson :oops: ).

 

 

 

Without this cue, the information remains hidden, or forgotten. I guess if we were on an alien planet, learnt the language and such, there would be some aspects of our past which we would forget. However, once the cue, such as the language is provided, the memorys would come back. A matter of association.

 

 

 

Wow, living proof I did learn something in my Psychology A level lol.

 

 

 

I apologise if that all made no sense!

I think that it involves a 'cue' as ctp said. You could forget the entire lyrics to a song, but if you heard the song played again, I think your memory would come back to life, and remember the lyrics to an extent.

 

 

 

I know that from memory I can't really recall alot I've learnt in the Spanish and German classes I took. But if I saw a picture, or was speaking to someone who knew what I knew of the language (or in other words, wasn't talking fluently, because I don't know all of the languages) my memory would probably come back to me.

A cue indeed.

 

 

 

In my experiences and in my studies, the vast majority of these cues are linguistic; I know that when I hear certain words (such as "surrender"), certain thoughts are triggered (the etymology of the word, in this case).

 

 

 

But if I were to forget these words, the thoughts and memories behind the words would become meaningless and confusing and it is pretty sure that I would forget them, just because the words have been forgotten. And that is the point of this thread.