The motorboat pulled away from the beach not long after dawn. Derek Bickerton stood on the pale pink sand, a shopping bag beside him packed with a blanket, a camera, a water bottle, and a loaf of bread. Through the clear blue-green shallows he could see neon flashes of color as tropical fish glided along the reef. Behind him lay a grove of coconut palms and a mangrove swamp. He was now completely alone, some 300 miles due east of the Philippines. It was June 1978.
He had a day and a half in which to establish that the little island of Ngemelis was safe for some two dozen people to inhabit. If all went well, they would be arriving in a few months. I nearly got washed out over the reef in a riptide, but apart from that it was rather fun, Bickerton recalls now, amid the books and papers of his tiny office at the University of Hawaii. It was an ideal place, really.
That was good news, because Bickerton planned to pay six young families to live on Ngemelis for a year. While isolated on the island they would build housing, dig a well, grow coconuts, and get on with the business of raising their small children. There would be only one catch: each family would speak a different language. To communicate they would have to use a simple vocabulary of 200 easily pronounced words that Bickerton, a professor of linguistics, had made up. The children would learn their parents’ language in the normal way; but as they played with one another, he expected, they would build on the artificial vocabulary to create a form of speech that wasn’t any one family’s tongue but a new one they could all understand. In other words, while the parents grew coconuts, the children would grow a language.
The idea for such an experiment is an ancient one, Bickerton points out. In the seventh century B.C., according to Herodotus, the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I ordered two newborns to be raised in total silence to hear what tongue they would utter first. (Their babbling sounded like Phrygian, the Egyptians concluded.) Similar experiments were tried by other curious tyrants, including Frederick II of Sicily, James IV of Scotland, and Akbar the Great, the Mogul emperor of India from 1556 to 1605. Akbar quarantined a houseful of newborns with tongue-tied nurses for several years to prove his notion that children had to hear people speak in order to master language themselves. After his little victims all turned out mute, Akbar proclaimed that anyone who could still disagree with him had hamstrung the camel of the Why and Wherefore. Mogul science prudently let the matter rest there.
Today many linguists believe Psamtik and Akbar had hold of separate pieces of the truth. As the Mogul emperor suspected, children can’t learn to speak properly unless they’re exposed to a language at a very young age. On the other hand, when they’re exposed to any tongue whatever, they pick up the lingo with remarkable ease, considering that language is a system so complex that not even a linguist can explain all its rules. As the pharaoh recognized, this knack, common to all children, suggests that some aspect of language--if not its rules, at least the ability to figure out the rules--is built in.
