this is an interesting subject. i’m currently reading a book that talks a lot about language.. a few excerpts you might find interesting…
“the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik isolated two infants in the seventh century B.C. and commanded the servant in charge of them never to utter a word in their presence. According to Herodious, a notoriously unreliable chronicler, the children learned to speak—their fist word being the Phrygian word for bread. In the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II repeated the experiment, hoping to discover man’s true “natural language” using similar methods, but the children died before they ever spoke any words. Finally, in what was undoubtedly a hoax, the early-sixteenth-century King of Scotland, James IV, claimed that Scottish children isolated in the same manner wound up speaking ‘very good Hebrew.’
Cranks and ideologues, however, were not the only ones interested in the subject. Even so sane and skeptical a man as Montaigne considered the question carefully, and in his most important essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, he wrote: ‘I believe that a child who has been brought up in complete solitude, remote from all association (which would be a hard experiment to make) would have some sort of speech to express his ideas. And it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals… But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and what has been said about it by conjecture has not much appearance of truth.’
Beyond the cases of such experiments there were also the cases of accidental isolation—children lost in the woods, sailors marooned on islands, children brought up by wolves—as well as the cases of cruel and sadistic parents who locked up their children, chained them to beds, beat them in closets, tortured them for no other reason than the compulsions of their own madness. There was the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (thought by some to be the model for Robinson Crusoe) who had lived for four years alone on an island off the coast of Chile and who, according to the ship captain who rescued him in 1708, ‘had so much forgotten his language for want of use, that we could scarcely understand him.’"
tommystinks
Jun 17 2003
05:47 pm
this is an interesting subject. i’m currently reading a book that talks a lot about language.. a few excerpts you might find interesting…
“the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik isolated two infants in the seventh century B.C. and commanded the servant in charge of them never to utter a word in their presence. According to Herodious, a notoriously unreliable chronicler, the children learned to speak—their fist word being the Phrygian word for bread. In the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II repeated the experiment, hoping to discover man’s true “natural language” using similar methods, but the children died before they ever spoke any words. Finally, in what was undoubtedly a hoax, the early-sixteenth-century King of Scotland, James IV, claimed that Scottish children isolated in the same manner wound up speaking ‘very good Hebrew.’
Cranks and ideologues, however, were not the only ones interested in the subject. Even so sane and skeptical a man as Montaigne considered the question carefully, and in his most important essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, he wrote: ‘I believe that a child who has been brought up in complete solitude, remote from all association (which would be a hard experiment to make) would have some sort of speech to express his ideas. And it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals… But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and what has been said about it by conjecture has not much appearance of truth.’
Beyond the cases of such experiments there were also the cases of accidental isolation—children lost in the woods, sailors marooned on islands, children brought up by wolves—as well as the cases of cruel and sadistic parents who locked up their children, chained them to beds, beat them in closets, tortured them for no other reason than the compulsions of their own madness. There was the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (thought by some to be the model for Robinson Crusoe) who had lived for four years alone on an island off the coast of Chile and who, according to the ship captain who rescued him in 1708, ‘had so much forgotten his language for want of use, that we could scarcely understand him.’"