Genie #1

1. What was Psamtik's experiment? What did he hope to learn? Did he?
His experiment was to take two children from their mothers at a very young age, and put them in a hut with a shepherd who would not speak to them. He hoped to learn what the protolanguage, the very first language was, and he hoped that it would be Egyptian, or related to Egyptian, because he was the King of Egypt at that time. When “the pair accosted [the shepherd] with their first utterance. The word they had developed was “bekos,” the Phrygian word for bread. Pstamik declared that Phrygian, the language of an Indo-European people in Asia Minor, was the protolanguage. However, his research “has not well stood the test of time.” There are problems with his experiment. “There is no way of ascertaining whether the children had a natural grasp of many languages and were merely expressing an innate human preference for Phrygian baked goods.” It is also possibly that the sheep the shepherd watch made a noise like bekos, and perhaps the children were imitating that noise.

2. Rymer claims on pg. 5 that "while his experiment was flawed in fulfilling its declared intention...it embodied both the theological questions and the practical quandaries that still bedevil the discipline." Where did Abel hint at this same concept?
Abel hinted at the same concept in The Functions of Language, and linguistic competence. The questions of whether or not language is a learned skill, or a naturally adapted skill.

3. Why do Linguistics and Astronomy "constitute an unlikely sisterhood"?
Linguistics and Astronomy “constitute an unlikely sisterhood” because they are “both often constrained to be more observational than experimental—astronomy because its subjects are too distant to be experimented on, linguistics because its subject are too human.” The way each subject must be studied, have similar qualities, so they are considered to be in a sisterhood.

4. Why was the Social Worker concerned about the young girl that came to her Welfare Office with her mother?
The Social Worker was concerned about the young girl that came to her Welfare Office with her mother because she had a “halting gait and a curious posture—unnaturally stooped, hands held up as though resting on an invisible rail. The worker alerted her supervisor to what she thought was an unreported case of autism…”

5. Consider the history of Linguistics outlined in Chapter 5. Please explain how the study of language grew from the religious to the biological and finally to the psychological.
The study of language began as religious when, prior to 1450 (the beginning of the era known as the “High Renaissance”) when “European philosophers related [any question] to the Bible. Any human attribute must be inevitably mysterious and divine beyond investigation as the creator it reflected.” When Descartes (during the High Renaissance) “proposed the independence of the soul from the body, of the mind from the brain…allowed much leeway to the nascent [developing] science of biology.” When in the late 17th century “Leibniz proclaimed language ability to be a gift of God” and “language was considered [to be] an integral part—perhaps a keystone—of man’s soul or (less likely)man’s reason, or both,” the study of language was making a jump from biological to theological. “By the late 19th century as comparative linguists handled the relationship of one tongue to another, the bulk of questions concerning the relationship of language to man had disappeared into psychology—a discipline the questions helped create.”