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The famous experiment in ancient Egypt, where babies were placed together and no one taught them to speak, would it produce a new language?

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By A godmotherPublished 8 months ago 5 min read
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I don't know, have you ever heard of human baby language experiments.

Although this experiment did not cause any harm to the baby's body, its significant impact on the baby's mental and psychological well-being has long exceeded the significance of the experimental topic itself.

Surprisingly, this experiment was not conducted within the past 100 years, and its earliest start can be traced back to 2600 years ago. Yes, you heard me right. Twenty six centuries ago, some people conducted so-called scientific experiments on babies, and it can be clearly said that the history of this experiment is quite ancient.

Will a strange ancient Egyptian experiment produce a new language when no one teaches babies to speak?

At that time, King Psametik I of ancient Egypt was very curious about how human language was formed, because from his memory onwards, he only spoke the Egyptian language, so his impression seemed to be that people all over the world shared the Egyptian language.

Until one day, when he went out of his own country to lead troops to war, he found that the languages used by some tribes around him were fundamentally different from Egyptian languages. These languages were so jargon that he was very puzzled, and his mind began to open up under Psametik I.

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He pondered bitterly, since people in different countries and regions use different languages, are these innate talents that people bring from their mothers? Is it still cultivated from the day after tomorrow?

In order to solve this mystery, Psametik I conducted this very cruel experiment on infant neologism.

Firstly, Psametik I ordered people to find two children from the people. As both children belonged to the slave class, as the king, Psametik I was not distressed. Next, the king took them to a herder's house and ordered the herders to only provide them with some food every day. In addition, the herders were prohibited from communicating with children or making any noise during feeding.

If it is found that the herdsman is talking to the baby or making some indicative actions, there is no doubt that the herdsman will be in danger of being killed.

In order to save his life, this honest herdsman has been cautious in his work for many years. He always sends food and drinks to his children like a wooden person, even when it comes to the baby's babbling stage. The herdsman is diligent in his duties and has never spoken to the baby.

However, a few years later, the results of the experiment were greatly unexpected, as it all went against the king's imagination. Babies growing up in this silent world could not understand any human expressions and had never independently created a vocabulary related to human language.

These poor children only eat and drink like animals on weekdays, and sometimes express their emotions by crying or laughing. In addition, they have never spoken any so-called language, which is doomed to the failure of the experiment.

In fact, this type of experiment has always been controversial due to its overly challenging nature. After the reign of Psametik I, no one else dared to conduct this experiment for two thousand years.

Three hundred years ago, similar experiments were conducted in Europe to explore the mysteries of human language

Coincidentally, in the 18th century, King Frederick II of Prussia in Europe inherited the brainpower of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He was a naturally curious monarch, and one day, he also developed a great interest in human language. In order to explore the mysteries of human language, he conducted a similar baby experiment.

However, regarding this experiment, Frederick II, despite drawing on the lessons of his predecessors, making sufficient preparations, and being more strict with the experimental environment and procedures, as well as extending the experimental period to ten years, still achieved nothing in the end. These experimental children, apart from only producing monosyllabic sounds to express their emotions, did not form any language.

It can be seen that although the experimental time of these two kings differs by two thousand years, without exception, both experiments were unsuccessful. On the contrary, in these experiments, poor children missed their optimal growth period, resulting in their intelligence and emotional intelligence being far inferior to other children of the same age, and ultimately their fate passively became tragic.

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As the leader of primates, it is not uncommon for humans to grasp the reasons themselves. Even 30 million years ago, when human ancestors walked down trees, they would communicate with each other through various sounds and body movements. Although the communication at that time was full of primitive atmosphere, it cannot be denied that this was also a language.

Interestingly, even in the animal kingdom, there is a language of its own, such as birds attracting the opposite sex through various clear calls and communicating with each other.

Primate orangutans also have their own language, and what is even more terrifying is that in a language experiment in the 1950s, humans raised an orangutan alone and intentionally taught it various English vocabulary.

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After two or three years of training, this gorilla was able to pronounce a few simple English words just like humans, and could also say basic communication terms such as "hello" and "eat" to people. This change shocked scientists very much.

In the following experiments, scientists continued to instill vocabulary into the chimpanzee, but within just two years, the chimpanzee's vocabulary surged from four to five to 100. A few years later, the chimpanzee was able to master over 600 vocabulary and communicate with people easily.

This is actually a very frightening phenomenon, as no one deliberately cultivates how animals should speak, which indirectly proves that language is created by humans in a deliberate environment and not innate.

Unfortunately, even when people conduct language experiments on chimpanzees, some scientists still repeat the same mistakes and secretly conduct cruel language experiments on infants. Under artificial deprivation, children who could have had the right to speak are forced to lose their right to speak.

In fact, if we discard these cruel experiments and look at them from the beginning, it is not difficult to find that these two monarchs who conducted baby new language experiments have a strong spirit of scientific exploration.

However, we always need to understand that the process of human language formation is very complex and cannot be formed in just a few years, but has undergone a very long evolution.

In this long and millions of years, through the joint efforts of countless generations of ancestors, we groped forward in different tones, and through the concatenation of a word and a word, we finally came to the language commonly used by people today

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A godmother

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