in the biblical tradition, as described in the book of Genesis, God created Adam and hatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof"Alternatively, following a Hindu tradition, language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator oft universe. In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides humar with language In an attempt to rediscover this original divine language,a few experiments have been carried out, with rather conflicting results. The basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed to grow up without hearingany language around them, then they would spontaneously begin using the original God-given language The Greek writer Herodotus reported the story of an Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus (or amtik) who tried the experiment with two newborn babies mo than 2.500 years ago. After two years of isolation except for the company of goats and a mute shepherd, the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered, not an Egyptian word, but something that was identified as the Phrygian word bekos, meaning"bread. The pharaoh concluded that Phrygian,an older language spoken inpartof what is modern Turkey, must be the original language. That seems very unlikely. The children may not have picked up this"word" from any human source, but as several commen- tators have pointed out, they must have heard what the goats were saying. (First remove the kos ending, which was added in the Greek version ofthe story, then pronounce be as you would the English word bed without d at the end. Can you hear a goat?) King James the Fourth of Scotland carried out a similar experiment around the year 1500 and the children were reported to have spontaneously started speaking Hebrew, confirming the king's belief that Hebrew had indeed been the language of the Garden of Eden. It is unfortunate that all other cases of children who have been discovered living in isolation, without coming into contact with human speech, tend not to confirm the results of these types of divine-source experiments. Very young hildren living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all. This was inue of victor, the wild boy of Aveyron in France, discovered near the end of the eighteenth century, and also of Genie, an American child whose special life circumstances came to light in the 1970s(see Chapter 12). of evidence, there is no From this type"spontaneous" language. If human language did ema from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original language especially given the events in a place called Babel, "because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth." as described in Genesis(11: 9)