Genie

After your class has written the in-class essay, please read Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 of Genie. I apologize for the disturbing content, but the material is essential for our future discussion of Language. Once you have read these chapters, please answer the following questions and post them to your blog. The answers are due March 4.

1. What was Psamtik's experiment? What did he hope to learn? Did he?
Psamtik's experiment was to take 2 babies from their mothers at birth and place them in the isolation of a hut of a shepherd who would raise them without speaking to them, and then see what language the babies naturally began to speak, the "language of the world". This way Psamtik hoped to learn what the original language of the world was, but he didn't find out because the experiment didn't really work; the babies only said "bekos" which means bread in Phrygian, but all the other scientists since then brought out the problems with this experiment and its results, so clearly Psamtik did not truely find what he was looking for.

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?
In his chapter and about naming, reference, and meaning, Abel talks about the need for science and metaphysics to make linguistic meaning... But I'm not sure what the connection is or if this is the right one :( I don't really get this question...

3. Why do Linguistics and Astronomy "constitute an unlikely sisterhood"?
Rymer explains that "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 subjects are too human." (5-6) In other words, the sciences are similar in that it is hard to experiment and thus test theories on their subjects.

4. Why was the Social Worker concerned about the young girl that came to her Welfare Office with her mother?
The worker was concerned because the girl looked in terrible health; she had a "halting gait" and was "unnaturally stooped, hands help up as though resting on an invisible rail." Genie's malnutrition was also showing as she was very skinny and pale, etc., not anything like a normal healthy child. At first the social worker thought Genie had autism, but with more investigation their concerns for the child deepened.

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.
Language started out as being supposed to come from God like everything else, then after Descartes proposed the independence of the soul from the body and the mind from the brain, there was a way for science to get in there and explore linguistics without heresy, and then Epicurus felt that language was something of nature, so then biologists started researching the brain and its language... The questions then formed by linguists concerning the relationship of language to man turned into psychology.