Variation in the English Indefinite Article—Tim Pulju Ps. Q. Vol XVI, No 4 Contents

English is the Original Language

Modern linguistics has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what many of the ancients, especially Plato, already had surmised: language is inherent in the human from before birth, and the so-called “learning of language” is actually the application of the principles of Universal Grammar (UG) to the limited and faulty performance data of adult speakers in such a way as to make sense of the data. A natural question now arises. What if the child is not exposed to any data? Since UG is inherent, will the child develop language anyway, and if so, which language? My colleagues and I at Stammbaum University became interested in these questions several years ago. Because of the current unenlightened attitude toward scientific research held by the general public in Europe, we traveled to Egypt and there performed the experiment whose procedure and results are described below.

Before we came to Egypt, we had thought that perhaps Egyptian was the original language, since the Egyptians are certainly an ancient people. However, the results of the experiment controverted our earlier hypothesis. We began by snatching two randomly chosen new-born children from the marketplace and entrusting them to the care of a goatherd. He was to raise the infants in a lonely house in the desert, taking care that no one should ever say anything in their presence. Only the goatherd, who supplied bread to the children, and the goats, who supplied milk, ever appeared before them. We then waited to hear from the herdsman what the subjects’ first utterance was.

After a considerable time had passed from the beginning of the experiment, one day when the goatherd was approaching the house with bread, he saw the children stretching out their arms and heard them saying [bekos]. Our first assumption was that this utterance was a single word, meaning ‘bread’ in some language. However, as time wore on the search was unsuccessful. We were on the verge of becoming distraught when our child language acquisition specialist, Dr. Immanuel Kant, realized that in chronological terms the children were at a stage of development when two-word utterances were common. Furthermore, many children at this stage have not acquired the understanding of past tense formation in their language. Immediately, we saw that [bekos] was to be interpreted as the the two-word English utterance “bake us”, with the meaning ‘You have baked for us.’ We feel that this evidence is conclusive. English is the oldest language, and Egyptian is older than the rest.

Hans Melkor
and 17 other distinguished
German scholars
Stammbaum University

Editor’s note: Ps. Q. does not condone such unethical research methods as were used in the above experiment. However, in this case the results were so significant that we decided, for the sake of linguistics as a whole, that we had to print the article.

Variation in the English Indefinite Article—Tim Pulju
Ps. Q. Vol XVI, No 4 Contents