In the biblical tradition, as described in the book of Genesis, God created Adam and
“whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
Alternatively, following a Hindu tradition, language came from Sarasvati, wife of
Brahma, creator of the universe. In most religions, there appears to be a divine source
who provides humans with language. In an attempt to rediscover this original divine
language, a few experiments have been carried out, with rather conflicting results. The
basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed to grow up
without hearing any language around them, then they would spontaneously begin
using the original God-given language.
The Greek writer Herodotus reported the story of an Egyptian pharaoh named
Psammetichus (or Psamtik) who tried the experiment with two newborn babies more
than 2,500 years ago. After two years of isolation except for the company of goats and a
mute shepherd, the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered, not an
Egyptian word, but something that was identified as the Phrygian word bekos, meaning
“bread.” The pharaoh concluded that Phrygian, an older language spoken in part of what
is modern Turkey, must be the original language. That seems very unlikely. The children
may not have picked up this “word” from any human source, but as several commentators
have pointed out, they must have heard what the goats were saying. (First remove
the -kos ending, which was added in the Greek version of the story, then pronounce beas
you would the English word bed without -d at the end. Can you hear a goat?)
King James the Fourth of Scotland carried out a similar experiment around the year
1500 and the children were reported to have spontaneously started speaking Hebrew,
confirming the King’s belief that Hebrew had indeed been the language of the Garden of
Eden. It is unfortunate that all other cases of children who have been discovered living in
isolation, without coming into contact with human speech, tend not to confirm the
results of these types of divine-source experiments. Very young children living without
access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all. (We will
consider the case of one such child later in Chapter 12.) If human language did emanate
from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original language, especially
given the events in a place called Babel, “because the Lord did there confound the
language of all the earth,” as described in the book of Genesis in the Bible