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
Hohenzollern or Hohenstaufen?
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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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 made of dust and ribs.
Some goat herders in the bronze age had this fun story about why snakes, the smartest animal, didn't have legs. Also the storm God of wrath that demands the blood of the first born babies or he will strike you dead, made a golem and named him 'red man' and he made a woman from the golem parts, and there were trees of concepts, and a flaming sword, and uhh.. yeah it kind of went off the rails. This is why I only worship Ashera. El and Adoni are such dicks.
His face when they just make incomprehensible grunts and poop on the rug.
They ended up developing a rudimentary sign language based on facial expressions and gestures. Because the women who were taking care of them were strictly instructed to never speak… But they were never given any instructions regarding facial expressions or gestures. So the kids learned that expressions and gestures are how to communicate.
Oh good, there's a bit of a silver lining. They weren't taught how to speak but the care-givers still interacted and communicated with them, albeit a limited amount.
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
If they're in a group with other humans. If you grow up without language like child raised by wolves then you just miss out on language completely and it's very hard to impossible to learn later once your special infant brain language tool is gone.
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.
As opposed to what? ''That time they intentionally prevented infants from teaching important foundational skills that crippled them for life because they had severe misunderstandings about how language works''?
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.
Just looked it up. They all died quickly. It's literally just "they couldn't live without it."
No, this passage is describing the care they needed.
It doesn't make any sense as an interpretation to jump right to death if you look at what the passage actually says. They died because they couldn't clap their hands? They died because they or their caretakers didn't smile enough (gladness of countenance)? They died because they didn't get enough gentle encouragement from their caretakers (blandishments)?
This was from a list of fucked up things Frederick II did written by a guy who hated him. If the kids had died as a result of the experiment, surely it'd say so. It's just saying the experiment was a a failure (labors were in vain) because of course they did not spontaneously start speaking Hebrew, Greek, Latin and instead had to rely on nonverbal communication.
If someone says "I can't live without my phone," they aren't going to literally drop dead one day if they forget it at home.
If you have a source laying around for info on the kids' deaths, I'd take it.
https://signsmag.com/2018/09/fredericks-experiment/
The babies literally died for want of touch
The emperor’s experiment, however, ended in tragedy. Deprived of emotional and social interaction, the infants did not develop any language and eventually died.
Tragically for those involved, Frederick never got an answer to the question he posed, and the original language of mankind remained hidden from him. The children, starved of any form of affection, warmth and basic interaction, died, quite simply, of a lack of love.
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