The MAD and Cruel Language Experiment by The King of Scotland

The MAD and Cruel Language Experiment by The King of Scotland

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Chapters:
0:00 Scotland
2:21 Egypt
3:03 Support

If children are not exposed to a spoken language, do they organically learn to speak one? This was a question that James IV of Scotland, the King of Scotland from 1488 –1513, was obsessed with.

Instead of simply pondering this question however, King James conducted an highly unethical experiment that would be impossible today. An experiment that was so cruel that it has been dubbed the forbidden experiment, along with all other language deprivation experiments.

As the story goes, King James, a man who was fascinated with language in general and who spoke several himself, sent two young children to be raised by a mute woman in isolation on the island of Inchkeith, an island in the Firth of Forth just north of Edinburgh. The purpose was to figure out whether language was learned or innate, and if it was innate and not learned, what was the innate language of human beings? In other words, what was the language of god?

Although there is not a whole lot of documentation about the experiment, with some debating whether it even took place or not, a 16th century Scottish chronicler did write about it. in In The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie wrote that:

“The king ordered a mute woman to be put on Inchkeith and gave her two young children in company with her, and provided them with everything they would need for their nourishment, food, drink, fire and candle, clothes, and all other kinds of necessities needed by man or woman. He was desirous to discover what language the children would speak when they came of proper age. Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but I myself know no more than my sources say.”

Of course, the idea that they just organically started speaking good Hebrew is nonsense, as ridiculous as saying that Scotland are good at football.

Sources:

Inchkeith, Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchkeith

Language deprivation experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languag...

Creative Commons Imagery:

Kim Traynor https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

#scotland #history #language