Introduction

According to statistics, there are currently more than 7,000 languages in the world, and when and where these languages originated and how they evolved is still a scientific mystery to be solved.

How is language really formed? What was the first human language? I believe that many people have had this question in their minds, and still do not have the answer, or are not sure of the answer in their minds, so history, the ancients have not also been curious about this question?

There really is! Not only that, the ancients also dared to think and do, and really found a baby for the experiment!

Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh's Experiment

According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus' History - Volume II, about 2,600 years ago, there was a pharaoh named Psammetikos in the land of ancient Egypt who was very curious about the world, especially about the creation of languages, what the "original language" (the first language) of the world was, and what the oldest people in the world were.

Of course there was a reason why Pharaoh had such doubts, and that was to prove the superiority of his own people and to gain a legitimate claim to rule over other peoples.

The ancient Egyptians have always believed that they are the oldest people among all mankind, their own national language is the origin of human language, other peoples and forces around, are transformed by the ancient Egyptians, but helpless other peoples around ancient Egypt, for the ancient Egyptians claim disdain, have claimed that they are the oldest people in the world, so Pharaoh Psammetikos wanted to prove it.

So how to prove it? According to Pharaoh's idea, people are defined by their language, so if we can prove that ancient Egyptian is the "original language", that is, the first language in the world, then we can prove that ancient Egyptians are the oldest people in the world, the most favored people by God, and the origin of all nations, which is helpful to improve national confidence. It is very helpful.

In addition one can claim that other peoples, all of whom evolved from the ancient Egyptians, can themselves thus claim the legitimacy of their rule over them. The Pharaoh's idea was that although these people did not speak Egyptian now, they were also ancient Egyptians, and since they were ancient Egyptians, he, as Pharaoh, had the right to rule them "legally".

Then to achieve these purposes, the pharaoh must first argue their own conjectures, so the pharaoh, who held the power of life and death of the ancient Egyptians, ordered the start of an experiment.

He found two newborn babies and gave them to a shepherd to raise (one said it was given to a woman whose tongue had been cut out beforehand), and asked the shepherd to take the two children to a place where they would live in isolation, away from the crowd, and ordered the shepherd to only raise the two children, but never to teach them to speak, not to speak a word in front of them, and not to touch outsiders, that is, to keep them isolated from the world, and not to touch any kind of human language until they speak.

During this period the children have to live in huts where no one goes and ask the shepherds to feed them on weekdays and wait until the right time to lead the goats to them so that they can live on milk. Then the shepherd has to observe their words and behavior, and as soon as the two children will say anything, they quickly report to themselves.

This was so because Psametikos just wanted to know what the first words a baby could speak without being taught a language or hearing any language were, whether they were ancient Egyptian or not, because he took it for granted that the language that came out of the mouth of a child who had not been taught any language must have been the original language, the first language given to man by the gods. If the child speaks Egyptian, then there is no doubt that Egyptian is the oldest language in the world! The Egyptians are also the oldest people in the world! Thus indirectly proving that all the other peoples of the world evolved from the ancient Egyptians.

Slowly, over time, the two babies grew up together in a world without language, eating and sleeping together, playing and frolicking together. After a few years, the two babies grew physically taller and learned to walk, but they could not speak until one day when the shepherd opened the door to feed the children, both of them came running to him with their hands outstretched and a word came out of their mouths - "becos" (βεκό ϛ).

When he heard that the children had finally spoken, the shepherd did not dare to be slow, and hurried to Psammetikos to report the matter, swearing that he had never spoken to the two children, nor had he exposed them to any other language.

He asked the shepherds to bring the two children to him and heard the children's language with his own ears, and then ordered the linguists to look up the word βεκόϛ to see what it meant, what language it belonged to, and where it came from.

After repeated inquiries, they found that the word βεκόϛ, which means "bread" in Phrygian, was a great disappointment to the Egyptian pharaoh, because the experiment did not prove that his own language was the origin of human language, but that the language of the Phrygians was the oldest original language of mankind, a more ancient people than the Egyptians, and the most likely source of all races.

Postscript

Pharaoh's experiments and the view he finally arrived at are certainly wrong, because language does not arise out of thin air; it requires human group living and, moreover, a long process of evolutionary accumulation. If you just put a human baby from the moment he was born, let him grow in a silent environment, then even if he has a companion existence, that can not produce a new language! This is not absolutely related to the number, because there have been cases in history where dozens or hundreds of infants lived together for years without creating a new language, but instead formed a "gestural language".