This was a favourite subject of mine about a couple of decades ago. Here is something that I remember from those days:
In the ancient times, people used to believe in the existence of a proto-language - a language shared by the human race. The "ancient" here refers to nearly 3 millenia ago. They believed this proto-language served the basis for other languages.
A pharoh named Psammetichus I decided to conduct an experiment. He originally sought to prove that Egypt was the oldest human civilization in the world. Nonetheless, he remained faithful to the scientific reality even after the experiment pointed out to another culture as a possible candidate for being the most profound civilization.
The same motive was shared by the linguists of the Hitler era who claimed that German is the original language spoken by Adam the difference here being, the Germans did not care about the scientific truth.
I found a paragraph that repeats what I learned in those days:
quote Wikipedia
The Greek historian Herodotus conveyed an anecdote about Psamtik in the second volume of his Histories (2.2). During his travel to Egypt, Herodotus heard that Psammetichus ("Psamṯik") sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all people. When one of the children cried "bekos" with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was Phrygian because that was the sound of the Phrygian word for "bread." Thus, they concluded that the Phrygians were an older people than the Egyptians, and that Phrygian was the original language of men. There are no other extant sources to verify this story.
unquote Wikipedia.
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