🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <92198.174113GRV101@psuvm.psu.edu>, Callec Dradja <GRV101@psuvm writes:
>My question is, what would happen if you were to raise children in an
>environment without language? I ran into a similar idea once before. It turns
>out that there is an old story about two children who were raised, as an
>experiment, by a deaf woman. The children had no exposure to any type of
>language whatsoever. At the end of some appropriate period of time, the
>children were checked on and lo and behold, they spoke fluent Hebrew. The idea
>here, of course, was that Hebrew was the 'unBableized' mode of human speech.

Others have addressed the issues; I won't bother with them.

However:  The story is reported in the first book of Herodotus' _History_, as
an experiment by the Egyptian Pharoah Psammetichus.  Two children were isolated
except for sheep.  When a word was uttered, it was "bekos" (usual English
transcription), which was determined to be the *Phrygian* word for bread.

One wag of my acquaintance, noting that the "e" in the transcription represents
an ETA, has suggested that the word was more like "baaa-kos"...

(Note to non-native speakers of English:  The sound made by sheep is
conventionally rendered by the word "baa" in English.)

(Note to non-linguists:  The Greek letter ETA represented a front mid-low or
front low vowel, ASCII IPA E or AE, in Herdotos' time.)
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_