introduction
According to statistics, there are currently more than 7,000 languages in the world, and these languages originated in when and where, how they evolved and formed, which is still a scientific mystery to be solved.
How exactly is language formed? What exactly was the first language of mankind? I believe that many people have had this kind of question in their minds, and they have not yet answered it, or they are not sure of the answer in their hearts, so in history, have the ancients ever been curious about this kind of question?
There really is! Not only that, the ancients also dared to think and dare to do it, and really found babies to conduct experiments!
Experiments of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs
According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus' History Volume II, about 2,600 years ago, there was a pharaoh named Psamitrios on the lands of ancient Egypt, who was very curious about the world, especially about the origin of languages, the language of the world's "original language" (the first language), and what the oldest people in the world were.
Of course, Pharaoh had such doubts, and there was a reason for this, that is, to prove the superiority of his own people and to obtain a legitimate claim to rule over other peoples.
The ancient Egyptians have always considered themselves to be the oldest nation in all mankind, their own national language is the origin of human language, and other peoples and forces around them are all transformed by the ancient Egyptians, but other peoples around ancient Egypt have dismissed the claims of the ancient Egyptians and claimed that they are the oldest people in the world, so Pharaoh Psamitius wanted to prove it.
So how do you prove it? According to Pharaoh's idea, people are all defined by language to define the nation, so as long as it can be proved that ancient Egyptian is the "original language", that is, the first language in the world, then it can be proved that the ancient Egyptians are the oldest nation in the world, the most favored nation of the gods, and the source of all ethnic groups, which is very helpful for improving national self-confidence.
It is also possible to claim that the people of other peoples evolved from the ancient Egyptians, and thus to claim the legitimacy of their rule to them. Pharaoh's idea was that although these people did not speak Egyptian now, they were also ancient Egyptians, so since they were ancient Egyptians, as pharaohs themselves, they had the right to "legitimately" rule over them.
To achieve these goals, the pharaoh must first argue his conjecture, so the pharaoh, who held the power of life and death in ancient Egypt, ordered the beginning of an experiment.
He took two newborn babies and gave them to a shepherd to raise (one said, to a woman whose tongue had been pre-cut), to take the two children to live in an isolated, isolated place, away from the crowds, and ordered the shepherds to raise only the two children, but never to teach them to speak, not to speak a word in front of them, not to have contact with outsiders, that they were isolated from the world, and that they could not be exposed to any human language until they spoke.
During this period, the children were required to live in huts where no one went, and the shepherds were required to wait until the right time to bring the goats to them and feed them. Then the shepherds watched their words and deeds, and as soon as the two children could say anything, they reported it to themselves.
The reason for this is that Psamitrios just wanted to know what the first words a baby could say when no one taught language and could not hear any language was ancient Egyptian, because he took it for granted that the language spoken from the mouth of a child who had not been taught any language must be the original language, the first language given to man by the gods. If a child speaks Egyptian, there is no doubt that Egyptian is the oldest language in the world! The Egyptians are the oldest people in the world! Thus indirectly proving that the other peoples of the world evolved from the ancient Egyptians.
Slowly, as time went on, the two babies grew up together in a languageless world, eating and sleeping together, and playing together. A few years later, the two babies grew taller and learned to walk, but they could not speak, until one day when the shepherd opened the door to feed the child, both children ran to him with their hands outstretched and shouted a word in their mouths - "beta εκόϛ".
Hearing that the children had finally spoken, the shepherd did not dare to be idle, and hurried to find Psamitius to report the matter, and swore that he had never spoken to the two children or exposed them to any other language.
When He heard of this, Psamitrios was also ecstatic, and asked the shepherd to bring the two children to him, heard the children's language with his own ears, and then ordered someone to find a language expert and ask them to look up the information carefully to see what the word "beta εκόϛ" meant, what language it belonged to, and where it came from.
After repeated inquiries by scholars, they found that the word "Betax" (βεκόϛ) is very similar to the meaning of "bread" in Prigiarism, which disappointed the Egyptian elders, because the experiment did not prove that the language of their own people was the origin of human language, but proved that the language of the Prigias was the oldest primitive language of mankind, a nation older than the Egyptians. Most likely the source of all races.
postscript
Pharaoh's experiment and the final view must be wrong, because language is not produced out of thin air, and the production of language requires human social life, and it needs a long process of evolutionary accumulation. If you just let a human baby grow in a silent environment from the moment he is born, then even if he has a companion, it will not be able to produce a new language! This has nothing to do with the number, because there have been dozens or hundreds of babies living together for many years in history, and no new language has been produced, but an example of "gesture language" has been formed, and it is impossible for babies to gather together to create a new language in a few years or more than ten years.