Children learn to communicate at an astonishing rate when they are young and interacting with family members. They become fluent quickly, even if they are exposed to several different languages. But does that innate drive to communicate depend completely on exposure? That's a question that has always puzzled us, although it was approached differently in the past. The ingrained idea in ancient times was that humans have a "natural" language, and proposed experiments aimed at finding out which language that is, which would obviously indicate that language's superiority.
The earliest such account comes from Herodotus, who described a supposed experiment by Psamtik I (who ruled Egypt from 664-610 BCE). Psamtik is said to have placed two newborns in the care of a shepherd with instructions to raise the children in isolation, with goats to provide milk as needed and no exposure to human speech. The goal was to determine whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the “eldest of all men” by observing whether these isolated children grew to speak the Egyptian or Phrygian language. According to legend, when the children were brought before Psamtik, they held out their hands and cried “becos”, the Phrygian word for bread. This was taken as evidence that the Phyrgians, rather than the Egyptians, were the oldest people. It is unlikely that these events unfolded exactly as described by Herodotus, but it does show that our fascination with the origins of language dates back thousands of years.
Such experiments are quite unethical, as confirmed by cases of children who were discovered to have been raised in abusive isolation situations. These children have profound language difficulties, but due to neglect, they have a host of other problems as well. However, there was a case in Nicaragua where children were cared for but raised in language-deficient circumstances, and they managed to build their own language. Read about that astonishing scenario and more at Today I Found Out.
(Unrelated image credit: Yılmaz Kilim)
