Akbar: The Great Language Experiment which continues to amaze the world

by Guest Thu Mar 23, 2017 1:14 pm

AN EARLY LANGUAGE EXPERIMENT: FAILURE OR TRIUMPH?
Late in the 16th century, the Mogul emperor Akbar the Great tested his hypothesis that babies raised without hearing speech would be unable to speak. He had twelve infants raised by mute nurses in a house where no speech could be heard. Several years later, he went to the house and found that none of the children spoke. Instead, they conversed only in signs. Akbar's hypothesis seemed to be supported: no oral input, no oral language language learning.

But most accounts of Akbar's experiment miss the most interesting point. The silent house where the children were raised was called the Gong Mahal, the "Dumb House". But Gong (as Gernot Windfuhr tells me) meant not only `dull, stupid'; it also meant `one who converses by signs'. The mute nurses likely conversed with each other in signs; they must have communicated with their infant charges in signs -- and the children must have developed a kind of sign language. So although Akbar was right in predicting that the children would not learn an oral language, it seems likely that they did in fact learn, or create, a sign language -- either from normal signed input from the mute nurses (if the nurses had a fully developed sign language) or by further developing a rudimentary sign language used by the caregivers.

A rather different version of this story holds that Akbar's goal (or at least one of his goals) was to find out what language the children would speak when they grew up, thinking that that would be the world's original language. (This experiment is in the spirit of the similar, though smaller-scale, experiments supposedly conducted by the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichos and by King James I of England.) The fact that the children turned out to converse only in signs was deemd a complete failure of the experiment if that was its goal. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that that result might instead suggest that the world's original language was a sign language, not an oral language. (Unlikely, perhaps, but it would be a reasonable conclusion given Akbar's premises.)

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000078.html

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Two corrections:

1. it should be goong, not gong (goong mahal = house of the dumb)

2. The 'different version of the story' is the one i am familiar with. Akbar actually believed that the children would grow up speaking some language which could be considered the world's 'original language' according to the version of the story i have read. But the story seems authentic because it is narrated by both Abul Fazal, Akbar's confidante and court historian and Badaoni, a bigoted courtier at Akbar's court who hated Akbar and who wrote his memoirs privately.

3. Similar language exeriments were attempted in Egypt and also in England:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/75378/king-scotlands-peculiar-language-experiment

4. A good analysis of the experiment:

Obviously, the experiment seems a bit cruel. But you must admit Silenceit is an interesting question, what would happen if we grew up in silence? The evidence given by this experiment seems to say that we naturally turn to a form of sign language, suggesting that perhaps our first language was not an oral one at all. What is also interesting is that although these children had the capability of speaking and they later learned how to do this, no initiative was taken by them as they were growing up to explore this faculty. The children did not create their own oral language, but a sign language instead. If we are to follow the evidence given here and draw it out it is quite interesting to imagine what caused humans to make the jump from a sign language to an oral language in the first place? The question is quite complicated as there are many factors in this experiment which make it hard to generalize, but I can’t help but think about the impact of the nurses who also did not speak in their presence. What was the effect of this modeled behavior on the developing consciousness of these young people? It is likely that these nurses also used sign language to communicate with each other around the children so that is what the children did also.

All of this is speculation, but it is quite an interesting experiment to speculate upon. Part of the reason for that is the fact that we can hardly imagine subjecting young people to this bizarre treatment. And yet there is a certain curiosity that is piqued upon reading about such things. There are likely other such experiments that have been done in the course of history and maybe I will explore those as well. This was just something that I wished to share.

https://ryan1bowen.wordpress.com/tag/akbar-the-great/