How does amnesia not affect language and speech?
In: Biology
Because if it did it would be called aphasia instead.
Jokes aside, words mean what we want them to mean, and, especially for technical contexts like medicine, narrow, highly specifc meanings are more useful than looser, vaguer meanings. In this case, it’s useful to have separate words for losing “biographical” memory and losing “language” memory.
In practice, the two things often go together, in the same way that, if you get hit by a heavy object, oedema (swelling caused by accumulated fluids) often goes together with haematoma (bruising caused by ruptured capillaries), and it’s more useful to think in terms of where those conditions come from: e.g. a stroke can cause amnesia and/or aphasia.
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