Content note: human experimentation.
There’s an adage that language is what separates humans from animals. We’re also the only critters with chins, but that was obviously an adaptation for folding towels. It’s somewhat less clear though how our ancestors started piecing together noises with assigned meaning.
A handful of royal chucklefucks tried to sort it out with “science.” And human suffering.
Today’s Moment of Science… The Forbidden Experiments.
Some hypotheses on how language developed hold more plausibility than others, but there are a lot of unknowns. Studies suggest that the earliest humans had the mental capacity to talk about 200,000 years ago, but just because we could have doesn’t mean we did. Furthermore, since written history only started about 5,500 years ago, evidence for how this all shook down is hard to come by.
But some highly motivated and annoyingly powerful people wanted to know what it sounded like when God told Adam he’d been a very naughty boy, so.
A handful of experiments have allegedly been conducted centuries apart with a similar goal: unlocking the mystery of how language sparked into existence from silence. Or finding the ‘natural language’ God gifted to Adam and Eve, something like that. For these experiments, test subjects couldn’t have previous exposure to language, lest any speech they come up with be anything other than divinely inspired. The only people who fit the bill simply couldn’t say no: newborn children. They would have all their needs met physically, but would not have a word spoken to them.
There were two fairly similar experiments separated by over two thousand years. Psamtik I, pharaoh of Egypt from 664-610 BCE, gave two newborns to a shepherd and was like “give them the silent treatment and let me know how it works out.” They interpreted some infant babbling as the Phrygian word for bread and decided that Phrygian was the original language. Then there was King James IV of Scotland, a ‘progressive’ monarch for the start of the 1500s. He sent two babies to live with a deaf mute woman on an island to see what the “language of the Gods” was, as he called it.
There were claims that the children came back speaking Hebrew. There were also reports that fucking of course the kids couldn’t say a goddamn word.
The most well known of these experiments was conducted by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. He was also king of Germany, Italy, Sicily, your mom, and for all of four seconds he managed to be king of Jerusalem by marriage. This guy had a science project he wanted to do, not a soul would tell him no through half of Europe. This being the 1200s, there weren’t exactly IRBs or ethical guidelines for experiments, especially not for his royal highness of Genovia.
The experiments were recorded for history by the monk Salimbene di Adam, but details are fuzzy. Wetnurses and foster mothers would care for the children, but only to a point of keeping them clean and fed, and without any cooing or affection. Children were not only to be raised without language, they were being raised with minimal human interaction. This was all to see what language God intended to pour from the unvarnished children.
Salimbene’s record concludes that Frederick “struggled in vain because all the children died, (…)for the children could not live without clapping of the hands, the merry grimacing and the caresses of their nurses and breadwinners.”
Lastly, there was Akbar the Great, emperor of the Mughal Empire. This was late in the 1500s, and his hypothesis was a little different. He thought that children wouldn’t learn to speak without hearing the spoken word. A dozen children were sent to be raised by mute wetnurses to see if they would or wouldn’t develop language. Reportedly he found that they hadn’t developed oral language, but were communicating with a proto-sign language. Suggesting that perhaps the first language was not spoken at all.
Akbar’s experiment asked a different question than the others. Where Akbar thought people needed to hear in order to acquire language, the three prior experiments proposed that God’s chosen tongue would spill from their test subjects’ lips with divine inspiration.
Contemporary scholars question the authenticity of these stories. Which means we’re a society that makes up legends about experimenting on babies.
But it also means the tales of a couple of infants being sent to an island or to live with a shepherd in silence almost certainly didn’t happen. Even if Frederick’s experiment was carried out (which is suspect), the reporting on it lacks the type of details needed for any degree of utility. Akbar’s experiments are generally believed to have been real.
There will be new attempts to figure out how language developed by looking at cave art and reconstructing ancient voices boxes. But humanity has likely seen the end of the forbidden experiment.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you to talk to your kids about goddamn anything because that’s some important childhood development shit.
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