A monk in the thirteenth century recorded a language experiment of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in which all the infants appear to have died. According to the Cronica of Franciscan friar Salimbene di Adam, the emperor bade
foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language … or Greek or Latin or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.
Scotland’s scientifically curious monarch James IV conducted a similar experiment in 1493. According to the historian Robert Lyndsay of Pitscottie, King James sent two infants to be raised by a deaf and dumb woman in a cabin on Inchkeith Island in the middle of the Firth of Forth. James too was searching for the original language of man. There’s not much information on the results of the experiment. ‘Some say they spoke good Hebrew,’ reported Lyndsay; ‘for my part I know not, but from report.’ The novelist Sir Walter Scott took a more sceptical view when he recounted the tale 300 years later. ‘It is more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the goats and sheep on the island.’
It’s unclear what the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great was up to with his language-deprivation experiments in the sixteenth century. Some say he wanted to find out whether people were innately Hindu, Muslim or Christian. Others that he was testing his hunch that babies raised without hearing speech would be unable to speak. He ordered twelve infants to be raised by mute nurses in a house where no speech was ever heard. Several years later, when he visited the children, he found his second hypothesis to be correct. None of them could speak; they communicated instead in signs.
Akbar the Great experimented on children with language deprivation
There are probably a few tall tales mixed in with the accounts of these horribly cruel experiments, but generally the results were inconclusive and irrelevant. Clearly there was no ‘original’ language which infants deprived of speech would speak; they simply didn’t speak at all. Stories about feral children, where language has been deprived by chance rather than by the order of a king, are better documented. A feral child is defined as a human child who has lived away from human contact from a very young age and has had little or no experience of human care, loving or social behaviour and, crucially, of human language. Studies of such children can help to understand the process of how language is acquired – how much of it is learned and how much is genetic. Unfortunately, in almost all the studies of feral children, practically nothing is known about the child’s life before their capture.
One of the most famous and well-documented cases is the so-called Wild Boy of the Aveyron. In 1797, in the midst of the madness of the French Revolution, a boy (aged about eleven or twelve) was discovered wandering in the forests of France’s south-eastern Massif Central, one of the most rugged and least inhabited regions of Europe. A hunter came upon the lad living alone, without clothes, without tools, eating and defecating like an animal and, most significantly, without language. He was captured and brought to Paris, where crowds thronged to see him. Victor, as the wild boy became known, offered France an opportunity to see the romantic theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in practice. Rousseau’s famous treatise posited the development of a child away from the influences of society, so that he could grow up as Nature intended. What the sightseers found in reality was a dirty, grunting creature, rocking backwards and forwards like an animal in a zoo.
Victor ended up under the care of a young doctor, Dr Jean-Marc Itard, at the recently established Institute for Deaf Mutes in Paris, which had been founded by the celebrated inventor of sign language Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée. Itard was a child of the Enlightenment and was fascinated by Locke’s theory that we are born with empty heads and that our ideas arise from what we perceive and experience. Itard decided he would need to educate Victor from the very beginning and so became his Pygmalion. Over the next five years he devoted himself to the boy, teaching him how to eat, use a toilet, repress his animal urges (particularly with the female inmates) and learn French. Victor’s vocal chords, like any muscle unused for so long, needed to be exercised, and Victor gradually began to articulate sounds, rather in the manner of a baby. It became clear he was not a deaf mute, although he may have suffered to some degree from autism which may have been the reason he had been abandoned in the first place. Itard’s methodology is what we would now consider behaviour modification – a system of punishment and rewards; with this treatment he hoped to prove one of the tenets of the French Revolution, namely that nurture could modify nature. At the end of five years Victor had learned some basic signs but, critically, he never learned to speak. Itard gave up, and Victor, after his brief moment of celebrity, lived in anonymity with Itard’s housekeeper until his death in Paris in 1828.
Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron
By a strange coincidence, a century and a half later, the premiere of François Truffaut’s film about Victor, L’Enfant sauvage, was showing in Los Angeles at exactly the same time as the discovery of America’s most notorious feral child. In December 1970, authorities in Los Angeles found a thirteen-year-old girl – later given the pseudonym Genie – tethered to a potty chair. She had spent her life since a baby naked and locked in her bedroom. Her father had forbidden his wife and son to speak to her and had barked and growled at her like a dog to keep her quiet. She had been fed a diet of milk and baby food and wore a nappy. When Genie was found, she couldn’t straighten her arms or legs and didn’t know how to chew or control her bladder or bowels. And she was almost entirely mute.
Genie became the subject of intense interest amongst linguists and behaviourists. Here was a young teenager who had missed out on the crucial stages of language development as a child. Studying Genie might finally answer questions about whether we have an innate ability to speak or whether we learn from our environment, and whether we can learn language at any time or only when we are young. Over the next six years Genie had intensive language training and testing. She learned some words and was good at non-verbal communication but she was never able to put words into a logical order (‘applesauce buy store’) and construct meaningful sentences. Despite evidence of an innate intelligence, she spoke at about the level of a two-year-old: ‘want milk’. Her lack of progress seemed to prove Chomsky’s theory that the innate left-brain capacity to learn language must be developed before the onset of puberty or it becomes unable to function for language acquisition.
Genie was fought over by psychologists, linguists, social services and her natural mother. But in the end, as she remained unable to master the basics of language, the researchers lost interest in her. It was the abandonment of Victor all over again. Today Genie is believed to be living in an adult care home somewhere in Southern California. She is still unable to speak in meaningful sentences.
Sign Languages
It was no coincidence that Victor, the wild boy of the French Revolution, landed up in the newly established hospital for deaf mutes in Paris, where for the first time sign language was being taught (using the system created by Abbé de l’Epée half a century earlier). What is apparent with Victor – and with Genie – is that the ability to talk is not the same as the ability to communicate using language. Speech is only one part of the complex thing we do when we communicate. Sign language – using visual signs rather than patterns of sound to express our thoughts – provides a different insight into how language evolves.
There are hundreds of sign languages around the world. From Bolivia to Finland, Somalia to Brunei, intricate systems of hand shapes, body movements and facial expressions exist wherever there are deaf communities. There’s even international sign language – Gestuno.
Sign languages develop independently from their oral counterparts. The British and Americans may speak a common English but they
have two quite different sign languages. Isolated deaf communities tend to evolve their own unique languages. Early settlers to Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts carried a gene for deafness. Soon there were so many deaf people on the island that the inhabitants developed their own sign language; by the nineteenth century hearing people moving into the area had to learn sign language in order to live in the community. The language eventually merged with mainland signs to form the American Sign Language. Yucatec Maya is signed in isolated villages in south central Yucatan in Mexico; Kata Kolok is the language signed in two neighbouring villages in northern Bali, Indonesia. And 150 members of the Al Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev Desert of southern Israel (where the rate of deafness is fifty times the norm) have a sign language with a unique grammatical and linguistic structure uninfluenced by local Arab or Hebrew spoken language patterns.
Sign language varies from country to country
The first historical record in Britain of signing was of a Leicester wedding ceremony on 5 February 1576 between one Thomas Tilsye, deaf and dumb since birth, and Ursula Russell. Thomas made his wedding vows to his intended by a series of gestures, including the tolling of a bell for ‘till death do us part’. As the vicar of St Martin’s Church wrote in the parish register:
First he embraced her with his armes, and tooke her by the hande, put a ringe upon her finger, and layde his hande upon his harte, and upon her harte, and helde up his hands towards heaven; and then to shew his continuence to dwell with her to his lyves ende, he did it by closinge of his eyes with his hands, and diggine out the earthe with his fote, and pullinge as though he would ring a bell.
Thomas Tilsye’s hand gestures were not sign language; his mimicking of actions and pointing to objects do not constitute a true language with its own syntax and grammar. But other anecdotal records from the sixteenth century onwards reveal evidence of simple deaf languages evolving in deaf communities in Britain. In his 1602 Survey of Cornwall, Richard Carew wrote about a young deaf man, Edward Bone, the servant of the local MP. Bone could lip-read but not speak. Carew describes how he could relay information to his master with an elaborate system of gestures but later, when he met up with his a deaf friend, he used a completely different signing style.
[The] two, when they chanced to meet, would use such kind embracements, such strange, often, and earnest tokenings and such hearty laughters and other passionate gestures, that their want of tongue seemed rather a hindrance to others conceiving them than to their conceiving each other.
The diarist Samuel Pepys described having dinner with his friend Sir George Downing (after whom Downing Street was named) on 9 November 1666, when a deaf servant had a conversation in sign language with his master about a fire in Whitehall: ‘there comes in that Dumb boy that I knew in Oliver’s time, who is mightily acquainted here and with Downing, and he made strange signs of the fire and how the King was abroad, and many things they understood but I could not’. Downing had been to school in Kent, in a community where congenital deafness was rife. Could he have learned Old Kent Sign Language, an extinct deaf sign language thought to have existed in the county at the time? Was his servant Kentish or did Downing perhaps teach OKSL to him?
Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée set up the first school for the deaf
The written history of sign language began in the seventeenth century in Spain. In 1620, a priest, Juan Pablo Bonet, published a ground-breaking book, Reduction of Letters and Art for Teaching Mute People to Speak. In it he set out a system for using a signed alphabet to teach deaf people. A century later, the French priest Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée set up the first public school for deaf children. Abbé de l’Epée had first come across deaf people when he was invited by a parishioner to administer Communion to her two daughters. He apparently mistook the silence of the two little girls for rudeness; when he found out they were deaf, he was inspired to find out more about how other deaf people communicated. He observed the rudimentary signing being used by the sisters and by other deaf people in Paris; from that – and drawing upon Bonet’s signed alphabet – he developed a standardized system of sign language which he then taught in the world’s first school for deaf children.
L’Epée’s method, ‘signes méthodiques’, combined a system of gestures with other invented signs which represented all the verb ending, articles, prepositions and auxiliary verbs of the French language. It was difficult to learn, and deaf students reportedly preferred to use their own community’s signing outside the school. However, the method quickly spread throughout France, Europe and beyond. One of L’Epée’s disciples, a man called Lauren Clerc, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817 to help establish sign language in the New World and created American Sign Language (ASL for short).
Established signed languages, just like spoken ones, can still struggle for their survival. In Britain, for example, deaf children were forbidden to use sign language from the 1880s onwards and had to learn to lip-read instead. It wasn’t until 1974 that it was agreed that British Sign Language is a language in its own right, although even today it has no legal status.
A theatre for and by deaf people might sound a bit strange but of course mime has been with us since the mimetic arts first started. Even if you don’t understand the detailed language of the signing, the expressiveness of so many of them gives you a good clue as to what is happening. Nonetheless, the fact that the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD), based in Connecticut, has been in existence since 1967 is a testament to the quality of their work. In the 1970s, NTD was the darling of the experimental and avant-garde, with directors like Peter Brook coming to experience and learn how the emotional directness of signing could be harnessed for dramatic effect.
Janiece, Ian and Claudia are part of the travelling NTD group and spend a good part of the year performing in schools and teaching children the basics of ASL. Janiece is the talking member of the team and translates for Ian and Claudia, who only sign. Claudia is from Germany so has a different, German sign language (which doesn’t put the verb at the end as in spoken German!).
Their sign language is a combination of spelling, gesture and cultural shorthand, which is perhaps what makes it so appealing for a theatrical performance. As an example they make the sign for Madonna, which is unmistakably that of pointy breasts, and then for Bill Clinton, which incorporates the sign for a sexual cheat. Like all languages, it seeks both clarity and efficiency, but on top of that can include character and reputation in a witty manner that dull spelling cannot.
National Theatre of the Deaf, Connecticut
Janiece agrees with that: ‘The deaf tend to put more of the spirit of something into the language – a form of bio-linguistics.’ The show itself is a wonderful experience. The actions are so dynamic and tell so much of the story that Janiece barely needs to translate the dialogue. It’s energetic and funny, and it’s easy to see why Peter Brook, theatrical magpie that he is, would want to include some of their techniques in his productions.
One of the most curious cases of sign language was uncovered in Nicaragua in Central America. In June 1986, American linguist Judy Kegl received an unusual phone call from the revolutionary government of Nicaragua. The education minister explained his country had a problem. They had opened two new schools for deaf children and were trying to teach them sign language. The trouble was, the children refused to be taught and were instead miming to each other with their own home-made gestures. Their teachers couldn’t understand what they were saying, and the children couldn’t understand the teachers. Would Judy fly down from Boston and advise the teachers what to do next?
Judy, a sign language expert from MIT, arrived in Nicaragua expecting to find the children communicating to each other with a jumble of basic gestures. Instead what she found astonished her. The children, most of whom had never met each other before and who had never been taught any form of signing, had compared the signs they had been using at home, shared them and modified them. They had added verb agreemen
t and other grammatical conventions. They had, in fact, developed their own complex sign language with precise rules and order – now known as Idioma de Senãs de Nicaragua (ISN). It’s akin to the process in spoken language when pidgin – spoken by a community who have a variety of different languages and devise basic vocabulary to be able to communicate – evolves into creole when it’s passed on to the next generation for whom it is their first language. The Nicaraguan children seemed to be developing the equivalent of a signing creole, and, as with creole, the crucial transformation from crude gesture to language was syntax.
All human languages are governed by complex rules, by syntax. As Judy says, ‘Syntax, the constraints on language, is something all human beings share. Constraints that are imparted to us by the fact that we share a single human brain … the ability to organize information, that allows us to construct novel sentences that have never been said before; that allows us to tell a story, to prophesy, to lie. I can surely communicate for communication’s sake when I have syntax; then I can truly use a language.’
One child who learned the invented language at school was Adrian Perez, who now teaches Idioma de Senãs de Nicaragua himself. He describes learning ISN as ‘like a rocket going off in your head’. Without language, ‘you can’t express your feelings. Your thoughts may be there, but you can’t get them out. And you can’t get new thoughts in.’
Judy adopted two of the Nicaraguan deaf children, and they now live in the USA. They sign with great animation, using the face as much as their hands.
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