Thread: needed: cover story for a thought experiment

I am working out a thought experiment about language and feral children that I want to tell through a short piece, but as yet it doesn't come coupled with an actual story, and I'm not easily seeing entry points for a story.

The basis of the experiment is written as a long prologue. I won't post the whole thing, but will nutshell summarize it:

-A shipwreck ends with 10 young children abandoned on an island.

-The 3 oldest, four, four and seven, die from accidents in the first 10 days. The accidents are a tragic story unto themselves, but I'm keeping the youngest relatively clear of the events so that they are starting as tabula rasa as possible.

-The remaining 7 children (the feral tribe of the experiment), all one to two years old, survive by scavenging bugs, worms and fallen fruit.

-within 6 months the children learn how to trap and kill small rodents and lizards.

-Two-year olds have less than 200 words usually. Within a year their vocabulary is reduced to about 100 words, mostly about food and hunting, but with some vestigial terms from before the shipwreck. Words are shifting in meaning.

-After 2 years the children, nearing four and five years old, are reduced to just over 50 words, almost entirely about hunting and survival. English roots are identifiable but pronunciation is shifting and applicable meanings for each word are expanding. The children use very simple syntaxes, usually consisting only of verbs, nouns and occasional adjectives.

-After 2 years the balance of fear and hunger has turned the children into proficient hunters, using stones to strike small herbivores dead and to cut the meat apart. They quarrel for food but have very strong bonds. The children are nomadic within a limited coastal region.

-After 5 years, the children are around 7, the language has grown back to about 100 words. Less than a quarter are immediately identifiable to English roots. Others have shifted greatly in pronunciation or meaning. About half of the words have been developed since coming to the island through mimicking natural sounds. The greatest portion of words reflect hunting or foraging, while another large part reflects regular activities such as grooming, washing and exploring. Syntax now consists only of single word statements as verb, noun or adjective, with occasional adjective and noun groupings. There are very few vestigial words.

-After 10 years (the point at which the experiment ends), the children are all nearing 12 years old. The vocabulary has reduced to about 75 words, all with practical application in day to day life. Both hunting strategies and sentence syntax have grown slightly in complexity. Verbs may now come coupled with a subject or object, but rarely with both. Subjects may appear with adjectives, but rarely do adjectives appear before objects. This syntax appears most often before and during hunting, while foraging and leisure time usually consists of single word utterances.

So... this is the experiment as I've laid it out. I'm deeply inspired by Lord of the Flies, but Golding wrote a thought experiment about culture, whereas mine is language. I'm circumventing the larger problem of "innate culture" by giving them the position of apex predator and allowing them to accidentally discover early the various strategies that allow them to succeed.

Most of what I've described here I've already written in narrative form. I'm happy with how the narration is going, but I don't feel that as a story it's going anywhere.

Sooo... there's these kids hunting on an island... and they yap at each other and make funny words... then hunt some more and one of them yaps about something... See how I'm stumbling with this? :/ Any suggestions?

Well... I think you should keep at least one older child. Two year olds probably wouldn't do so well with survival, and having say, a five-seven year old could provide your main character.

Other than that, I think this is your problem:

position of apex predator

Sure, they could become the top dogs, but that should be part of the evolution of the story. There may be deaths along the way, but oh well, makes things more interesting. An ideal first predator would be a snake, slithering across to the two year olds. But, if you have the five-seven year old kept alive, then he can save them You should put some pigmy elephants in too Good luck, and I'm sure if I've been of no help (apologies) then there'll be plenty of other people offering ideas after me anyhow.

I can't have any older children survive because that would interfere with the degradation of the language. As for the two-year olds surviving... we're a pretty resourceful animal, and I think it's the instincts that we unlearn which doom us rather than the vulnerabilities we are born with.

I'm not married to the apex predator idea. Perhaps I could use another predator in the area as a key threat. The main character will be the boy who emerges as tribe leader within the first couple years.

Well, the older one could be deaf for a while? Personally I went deaf when I was little after getting a pretty nasty virus, my hearing came back to me after one or two years I think. My speech was set back quite a bit, had to go to a clinic to get my pronounciations back on track and whatnot.

Regardless, my main point is that having predators is most likely the way to an interesting story with some key events to move things on with. The predators are, in a way, the antagonists for your story.

Hi Slugfly, just watched X-Files about the Jersey Devil, no speech patterns whatsoever, and 2 year old children would need parents etc to teach how to use their vocal cords, if not they would become redundant to sounds such as fear, anger, hate, love, pain, hunting food etc. Just a thought?

Language is (this is a bit of a controversial topic among linguists) an innate function of humans. Our ability to learn anchors for language supposedly caps out at around 12. So Jeanie, a feral child rescued at around 12 in either the US or Ukraine (don't recall) had learned some language, but would never get much. She was still fully capable of vocalization though, and even before she learned words she could express herself through barks, growls and wines.

I'm doing a public reading of this story today XD, in about 2 hours... best get back to editing...