Feel free to remove this, mods, if it’s too tangential to modern science, but I thought the community might find this early nature vs. nurture hypothesis amusing
To be fair, given the model he was working with, this was actually a descent experiment so long as you ignore the ethical implications.
This was perhaps done to “prove a hole in Adam and Eve story”? They were manufactured as adults, but might then lack the childish capacity for language learning. If created with fully developed language capacity, then why not create them with full understanding of obedience to God’s will. It would take a lot of time and patience to teach God’s language at a pace suitable for undeveloped beings.
His face when they just make incomprehensible grunts and poop on the rug.
This should be obvious, but even children will invent basic language. You only need to look as far as the deaf community for that, that always came up with pidgin languages even as they were forced to try and learn spoken language.
There’s an interesting free short documentary here: https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/history-deaf-education-1
Something tells me the results were displeasing
He caught one of the nursemaids speaking G*rman to the infant and the experiment had to be aborted. RIP
I think after it’s born, it’s just a murder.
And, honestly, calling it “the experiment” is pretty rough.
I didn’t even know they had GPS that long ago.
That is a really good joke.
I don’t get it… German joke?
Garmin, the GPS company
Maybe a Garmin joke? Even though it’s spelled with an i not an e, like the asterisk censored word in the comment?
Ah yes, Girman
According to Wikipedia:
“The experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles, who was generally extremely negative about Fredrick II (portraying his calamities as parallel to the Biblical plagues in The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II) and wrote that Frederick encouraged ‘foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which he took to have been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.’”
So, as you’d expect of someone raised without any formal language, other means of communication were necessary.
But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.
Am I the only one who interpretes this as “well, they died”?
It sounds to me it’s saying you had to do things like clap your hands to get their attention, gesture to communicate what you wanted them to do, and that you had to do so kindly and patiently or else they may not respond well. Alternatively, maybe it was the children who had to clap their hands and gesture, but then I’m not sure how they’d speak blandishments (kind, gentle encouragements, like “good job!”) to others.
Iirc, they did, yes
I would be very impressed of any of them were still alive 800 years later
I’ve been looking for a foster-mother nurse to suckle me my whole life.
Bonk.
I brought this up earlier in another thread, and I couldn’t find a wiki page for the actual experiment, just a page about similar experiments, where it cited this one briefly. But I’m pretty damn sure I read about years ago on Wikipedia just browsing random pages and doing the whole “rabbit hole” thing.
Apparently there’s enough comments to convince me this was serious. Generations would invent language, but it’s a tough ask for children to do it, and expect that it matches any existing langunge. Why cats and dogs are not called meowsers and woofers in a language I know is beyond me.
Children have been documented to spontaneously invent language.
Thank you for link. Interesting. It did show language evolving/changing quickly. Any expectation that they would reinvent ASL or Aramaic independently would have been an absurd expectation.
The Egyptian word for cat was “mau” so close enough
Cat in Mandarin is māo
TIL
