On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Gary Klatsky wrote: > I can't remember the pharaoh's name, I think it was Ptamtik II. He believed > that the Egyptians were the most ancient people and that their language was > the natural language. Other cultures had to be taught their language. To > test that he had two children raised without anyone speaking to them or > their hearing any language spoken. The expectation was that these children > would spontaneously learn the language spoken in Egypt at the time. > According to Rymer (1993), Psamtik I was an Egyptian king in the 7th century B.C. who desired to know which language was the origin of all others. As Gary noted, to test this, he used an experiment:
two infants were taken from their mothers at birth and placed in the isolation of a shepherd's hut. The shepherd was instructed not to speak to them. They were reared thus on a diet of goat's milk and silence until one day two years later when, the shepherd returning to his hut, the pair accosted him with their first utterance . . ."bekos," which, after some semantic inquiry on the part of the King, was determined to mean "bread" in the language of the Phrygians. . . . (pp. 3-4) Psamtik's conclusion was that Phrygian was the protolanguage. In addition to the obvious ethical issues to which Gary alluded, there are also a few methodological problems students might be able to pick out. Jeff Rymer, R. (1993). Genie: A scientific tragedy. New York, NY: HarperCollins. -- Jeff Bartel Department of Psychology, Kansas State University http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~jbartel Reading an email message about a new email virus? Getting a note that's been forwarded to a dozen other people? Before you pass it along, drop by http://www.US.datafellows.com/news/hoax/ for a list of recent hoaxes and chain letters. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
