Language deprivation experiments....What is the natural language of the human being?...What Happens if a Child Is Never Exposed to Language?

In the 13th century, King Frederick II (who spoke nine languages: Latin, Greek, Sicilian, Arabic, Norman, German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Slavonic) wanted to experiment with the "natural" language of mankind. He placed six babies in a nursery and ordered their nannies to feed them, put them to sleep, bathe them, but most of all, without ever talking to them.

Frédéric II hoped to discover what language these babies would naturally choose "without outside influence". He thought it would be Greek or Latin, the only original languages he could think of as pure.

However, the experiment did not produce the desired result. Not only did no baby begin to speak any language, but all six of them died and eventually died.
Ancient records suggest that this kind of experiment was carried out from time to time. An early record of an experiment of this kind can be found in Herodotus's Histories. According to Herodotus, the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I carried out such an experiment, and concluded the Phrygian race must antedate the Egyptians since the child had first spoken something similar to the Phrygian word bekos, meaning "bread". However, it is likely that this was a willful interpretation of their babbling.
An experiment allegedly carried out by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century saw young infants raised without human interaction in an attempt to determine if there was a natural language that they might demonstrate once their voices matured. It is claimed he was seeking to discover what language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God.
The experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles, who 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."
Several centuries after Frederick II's experiment, James IV of Scotland was said to have sent two children to be raised by a mute woman isolated on the island of Inchkeith, to determine if language was learned or innate. The children were reported to have spoken good Hebrew, but historians were skeptical of these claims soon after they were made. This experiment was later repeated by the Mughal emperor Akbar, who held that speech arose from hearing, thus children raised without hearing human speech would become mute.Children learn the language(s) that they hear and see around them at a young age, but what happens if a child just never has any linguistic input, spoken or signed? Although a scientific study around this question would undoubtedly be fascinating, it would also be extremely unethical, so much so that the cultural historian Roger Shattuck has called it The Forbidden Experiment.In times less hampered by modern sensitivities and human rights, several rulers viewed such an experiment as less than verboten. The Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I is reported by Herodotus around 600 B.C. to have isolated two newborns with a shepherd who was strictly instructed not to speak to them. Supposedly, the first word that these children uttered was becos, the word for "bread" in ancient Phrygian, but it seems quite likely that this was a willful interpretation of their babbling (think bababa).* A similar experiment was conducted by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century, but the Chronicle of Salimbene reports that "he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments."

In more recent centuries, we've discovered what happens when children are isolated from language through unfortunate circumstances. One example is "wild children," such as Victor and Genie, who have been abused or neglected, but as interesting as those cases are, it's hard to separate out the effects of language deprivation from other mistreatment.

Another way that children may be naturally isolated from language is if they're deaf children surrounded by people who don't speak a sign language. Although their families often manage a rudimentary form of communication with them, known as home sign, it resembles the ad hoc gestures that we'd do at a loud concert and lacks the full expressive powers of a complete sign language.

In Nicaragua in the 1980s, many such children were brought together in the country's first school for the deaf, where especially the younger children took the various home signs of their classmates and stitched them together into a full-fledged sign language, as you can see in the video below: A clip from the PBS documentary Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang. Nicaraguan Sign Language has been cited as evidence that although children require a certain amount of linguistic input at a young age in order to learn language, they're capable of generalizing from incomplete information to something far richer and more complex—a testament to the magnificent potential of the human brain.

Babies need communication to survive. Milk and sleep are not enough. Communication is also an essential element of life. The human being is a social being, it is not only the "biological" that allows him to live, but the "social" as well.
Frederick of Hohenstaufen1 (Federico II, as Emperor of the Romans), born on 26 December 1194 in Jesi near Ancona and died on 13 December 1250 in Fiorentino (near San Severo), reigned over the Holy Roman Empire from 1220 to 1250. He was king of Germania, king of Sicily and king of Jerusalem.

He experienced permanent conflicts with the Papacy and was excommunicated twice. Pope Gregory IX called it the Antichrist.

He spoke at least six languages: Latin, Greek, Sicilian, Greek, Arabic, Norman and German. He welcomed scholars from all over the world to his court, showed great interest in mathematics and the fine arts, carried out scientific experiments (sometimes on living beings) and built castles whose plans he sometimes drew up. Because of his good relations with the Muslim world, he led the sixth crusade - the only peaceful crusade - and was the second to reclaim the holy places of Christianity, after Godefroy de Bouillon.

The last emperor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, he became a legend. From his contemporaries, he received the nicknames Stupor Mundi (the "Stupor of the world") and "prodigious transformers of things", so much so that they waited for his return after his death. In the collective consciousness, he became the "sleeping Emperor" in the depths of a cave, the one who could not have disappeared, the one who slept from a magical sleep in the crater of Etna. His personal myth later merged with that of his grandfather Frédéric Barberousse: the legend of the xiiie century moved from the Sicilian volcano to Kyffhäuser mountain in the xve century, and Frederick II was replaced by Frederic I Barberousse. His charisma was such that the day after his death, his son, the future king Manfred I of Sicily, wrote a letter to another of his sons, King Conrad IV, which began with the following words:"The sun of the world has set, which shone on the peoples, the sun of right, the asylum of peace...".
Frederick II carried out also a deprivation language experiment on young infants raised without human interaction in an attempt to determine if there was an innate natural language that they might demonstrate once their voices matured. It is claimed he was seeking to discover what language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God. Salimbene di Adam 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 had 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.”
He was the son of Emperor Henry VI and Constance de Hauteville, daughter of Roger II de Hauteville, first Norman king of Sicily. When his mother was 40 years old6, his birth took place in public, in a tent on Jesi's main square7. The birth threatened to turn into a tragedy when two Arab doctors were called in to save the mother and child.
Frédéric-Roger was elected king of the Romans in 1196, at the request of his father, to ensure the dynastic continuity of the Hohenstaufen to the imperial throne. However, Henry VI died suddenly in 1197 and the Empress died in 1198 when Frederick II was still only a child of three years old. Constance did not claim the rights of the child in Germany, where the great ones, anxious to avoid a minority like Henry IV's, turned to the brother of the deceased: Philip of Swabia was elected king of the Romans in 1198, in place of his nephew. The Pope immediately elicited a competitor, the Welf Othon IV. Frédéric-Roger, on the other hand, was only king of Sicily, then including the island and most of southern Italy to the south of the papal states. Constance, when he died, entrusted the guardianship of the child and the kingdom to Pope Innocent III until his majority. Frédéric spent his youth in Palermo and at the age of fourteen he married Constance d' Aragon, eleven years older than him.
Othon IV was crowned Roman Emperor of Germany by Innocent III in 1209, but when Othon IV lost the favor of the Pope, he supported Frederick's election as King of Germany and excommunicated Othon IV in the Nuremberg Empire Diet of 1211. But this title of king of Germany, which was a prerequisite for the imperial crown, meant nothing as long as Othon IV remained emperor until his defeat at the battle of Bouvines in 1214.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments

Taken in: France / Île-de-France / Paris / Quartier de la Monnaie (show map)

Taken on: September 7, 2021

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