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Chewing, licking and sucking are extremely widespread mammalian activities, which, in terms of casual observation, have obvious similarities with speech. MacNeilage(1998)

We don’t usually think of speaking as similar to chewing, licking and sucking, but, like speaking; all of these actions involve movements of the mouth, tongue and lips in some kind of controlled way. So, perhaps this connection is not as improbable as it first sounds. It is an example of the type of observation that can lead to interesting speculations about the origins of spoken language. They remain, however, speculations, not facts. We simply don’t know how language originated. We suspect that some type of spoken language developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago). Yet, among the traces of earlier periods of life on earth, we never find any direct evidence or artifacts relating to the speech of our distant ancestors that might tell us how language was back in the early stages. Perhaps because of this absence of direct physical evidence, there has been no shortage of speculation about the origins of human speech.


The divine source

In the biblical tradition, God created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”. Alternatively, following a Hindu tradition, language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the universe. In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides humans 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 hearing any language around them, then they would spontaneously begin using the original God-given language.

An Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus tried the experiment with two new born babies more than 2,500 years ago .After two years in 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 in apart of 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 commentators have pointed out, they must have heard what the goats were saying. (First remove the-kos ending, which was added in the Greek version of the 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 started speaking Hebrew. It is unfortunate that all other cases of children who have been discovered living in isolation, without coming in to contact with human speech, tend not to confirm the results of these types of ‘divine source’ experiments. Very young children living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all. If human language did emanate from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original language, especially given the events in a city called Babel, “because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth”, as described in the book of Genesis (11:9).

Reference: Yule, George. 2006. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(giriums.blogspot.com)