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

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    4·
    2 hours ago

    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.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    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.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      34·
      4 hours ago

      He caught one of the nursemaids speaking G*rman to the infant and the experiment had to be aborted. RIP

    • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      4 hours ago

      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.