>>718454582
When a language loses much of its vocabulary is an easy one, like when there's a significant culling of the population, or when certain educational materials (most vulnerable in this context oral traditions) are lost to time. Easy examples in the variety of indigenous and native languages throughout north and south america, africa, and oceania where much of their history, including knowledge of events and customs, have been lost. In western countries an easy example is something like Irish, which nearly went extinct, and now the new speakers have lost much of the semantic context of its vocabulary. For a more widespread language, consider spanish, where island nations in the carribean or small populations in the jungles in south america lost significant portions of its verbiage over the centuries and thus, regardless of whether they speak a pidgin or purely spanish derived over time, they lack many concepts or contextually executed phrases that the rest of the spanish-speaking world retained. Most pressingly for the thread English literacy has been dropping in many parts of the US over the last century and replacing more historied etymology with less substantive slang makes each individual substitution less useful or cerebrally stimulating for both speakers and listeners. An individual might be reasonably intelligent despite a lack of linguistic capacity for intelligent discussion, but that disparity of itemized, categorized, and labeled conceptual mapping thus creates a situation where two otherwise equally intelligent people would have different capabilities with regards to executing their intellectual abilities.
