Series 3: The Forbidden Experiment
Part 1
The Greek historian Herodotus describes how the Egyptian Pharaoh Psamtik I conducted a strange and cruel investigation into the origins of language.
Part 2
The Holy Roman Emperor and amateur ornithologist Frederick II was alleged to have conducted a linguistic experiment similar to that of Psamtik. I explore that rumour in the context of medieval ideas about the origin of language.
Part 3
Our third rumour of this depraved linguistic experiment takes us to an uninhabited island in the Firth of Forth, where, in 1493, King James IV of Scotland is said to have emulated Psamtik I and Frederick II. Continued in the next episode.
Part 4
Following on from the episode on James IV's experiment, this episode investigates why it might have seemed plausible at the time that the children would end up speaking Hebrew, by looking at the rumour's context in Renaissance linguistics, bringing in characters such as a linguist who thought an Italian nun was a female equivalent of Jesus Christ, and another who claimed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was an early form of Dutch.
Part 5
The Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great's conquests led to him ruling most of the Indian Subcontinent - and he became obsessed with learning everything he could about the various religions practiced in his Empire. But amid his religious enquiry, he's said to have conducted another, more sinister investigation, into the mechanisms of language acquisition.
Part 6
Where did Akbar the Great get the idea for the experiment from? Given that he didn't have access to Herodotus, this episode looks at precedents in Ancient Indian and Medieval Islamic thought, before moving on to how questions of language acquisition and the origin of language developed since Akbar's time, bringing in a 'Wild Boy' from the South of France, several people claiming to have had languages revealed to them by God, and something called the 'Yo-He-Ho Theory'.
Images
An engraving from 1800 by Lambertus Antonius Claasens, illustrating Psamtik witnessing the outcome of his supposed experiment.
Source: Rijksmuseum
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos, demonstrating an Ancient Greek Clepsydra, as described by Empedocles (he claims that Empedocles used this to prove the existence of air, which is not correct).
A picture of Frederick II with a bird of prey, from a late 13th-Century manuscript of De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus, his book on ornithology.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A page from De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, with pictures in the margins of barnacle geese. In the book, Frederick describes an investigation debunking the Medieval myth that barnacle geese formed from barnacles on the planks of ships in the Arctic.
Litterae Ignotae ("Unknown Letters"), the constructed alphabet created by Hildegard of Bingen to write the Lingua Ignota
("Unknown Language"), a constructed language that she claimed was revealed by God. This key is from a manuscript c. 1200.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Sources
Primary Sources
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Epicurus (4th Century BCE): Letter to Herodotus, trans. C.W. Chilton (1962), quoted in Sean (2012): Ancient Theories of Language Evolution: The Origin of the Monolingual Myth.
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Alan Lloyd (1988). 'Herodotus' Account of Pharaonic History'. Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. Available from JSTOR.
Sean (2012). Ancient Theories of Language Evolution: The Origin of the Monolingual Myth.
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