There was an Egyptian pharaoh who did such an experiment, gathering a group of babies together without contact with the outside world, and forbidding them to speak, to see if babies could produce new languages, and the results of the experiment were very unexpected...
The pharaoh who did this experiment was named Busametikus. According to Herodotus's History, in the 6th century BC, Busamedikos decided to do a "companion experiment" in order to find out which language was the "oldest language in the world".
He asked a shepherd to take two newborn babies to a remote, uninhabited place, and gave only the two children goat milk every day, so that the first words the two children would say were the "oldest language" in the world.
In order to ensure that the experiment was not disturbed, the pharaoh strictly forbade the shepherd to speak while he was with the baby, and even arranged for someone to monitor outside.
In general, children will say simple words around the age of one. However, the two children can still only make a meaningless sound of "babbling" at the age of one.
Busamedikos did not give up, but let the shepherds continue to raise them.
Another year later, when the shepherd was delivering goat milk to the two children as usual, the two children suddenly shouted, "Bekos! ”
The shepherd and the guards hurried to meet Pharaoh and told the story of the baby's speech.
Bussametikus was disappointed because it was not an Egyptian word, but he hurriedly ordered people to find "bekos" in the language of the world.
Eventually, they found the word in the Phrygian language, which means "bread."
Busametikus thus declared: "The Phrygians are the oldest people in the world, and the Phrygian language is the oldest language in the world." ”
In fact, Bussamedikos's assertion has no scientific basis, and the words spoken unconsciously by infants do not necessarily have special meaning.
For example, in the 16th century, Akbar the Great of the Mughal Empire in India also did a similar experiment. He believed that human language was produced by acquired learning. To prove his point, Akbar had people build a soundproof house, find two newborns and put them in, and a mute nurse would take care of them.
After four years, Akbar recalled the experiment and visited them on a whim, only to find that the two children could only make sounds like "Uh-huh" and say nothing else.
In fact, language and thinking are closely related, and the thinking of small babies is not yet fully developed, and can only imitate the voices of the people around them, and can understand the meaning of these words as they grow up.
Busametikus and Akbar's "experiments" left babies without access to language, and the limitations of their thinking prevented them from creating language to communicate, and could only express their emotions by making meaningless sounds.
To take the most intuitive example, in 1920, India rescued two "wolf children" raised by wolves, who could not speak, and their living habits were similar to those of wild beasts, and they would howl at midnight.
These examples show that human language and knowledge are learned in the practice of acquired society. The production of language takes a long time to develop, and it is absolutely impossible for babies to invent a new language in just a few years.
