A Medieval Emperor's Natural Language Experiment | Hacker News Reader

A Medieval Emperor's Natural Language Experiment

resobscura.blogspot.com

16 pointsbenbreen13 comments

In a way, this is historical clickbait. Mention the rumours about Frederick II to get people talking about how wacky this episode is. But don’t mention that Frederick II is just one of several historical figures claimed to have carried out this experiment (one of the earliest is in Herodotus over 15 centuries before) and that it ever happened at all is dubious.

Doesn't seem to far fetched that at least 2 people in power in all of history came up with this question and experiment.

It actually does seem farfetched. You know how famous quotes get assigned to various other people than those documented to have said them? Half of the claims that a given historical figure carried out this experiment are probably just misattributions of the Herodotus story.

Doesn't seem farfetched to me, it's one of those obvious questions people frequently, spontaneously, ask themselves. Another is whether we both "see" the same colors associated with the names.

I'd be surprised if someone in our history didn't conduct this experiment. Ancient times had infanticide, slavery, and other terrible behaviors. This experiment is tame compared to many of those.

Also the first three paragraphs have no relation to the rest of the article and seems placed here for apologetical or political purpose.

Author here. I actually agree with you about the post being disjointed - Res Obscura is basically just my historical notebook where I jot down unusual things I might want to remember. Was teaching the Crusades to my world history class this week, hence the content about that.

Like I say toward the end, I'm mostly interested in the case as a hypothetical early example of pseudo-Lamarckian thinking (i.e. the assumption that babies somehow "know" their parents' language despite having no contact with them).

> that babies somehow "know" their parents' language despite having no contact with them

But this can be easily found out by talking to these Chinese twins who grew up in the US. Do they speak Chinese naturally? I guess not. I don't believe language would be hereditary.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2399360/Chinese-twin...

Sure, naturally we know that, in a post-Darwin world. But from a history of science standpoint, I'm interested by early attempts to understand aspects of heredity before Darwin.

Thanks for the explanation. With a couple more content it could have be an article on its one, I think.

A similar story appears in Herodotus, Book 2, Chapter 2, but here the ruler is the Egyptian king Psammetichus, and the children survive: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

>As late as 1760, the author of A New Complete English Dictionary speculated that Hebrew was the "language which God taught Adam." However, he noted that "others hold for the Syriac, Childee, Ethiopian, or Armenian" as potential first languages.

Anyone here who knows what language Childee might refer to? Ive never heard of it before and searching it gives no clue.

I am guessing Chaldean, language of the Chaldeans (sometimes archaically Chaldees)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldean_Neo-Aramaic

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