Many religious traditions, including the biblical account of Adam naming creatures and the Hindu belief in Sarasvati providing language, attribute humanity's linguistic ability to a divine source. This led to historical experiments attempting to discover this original, God-given language, based on the hypothesis that infants raised in silence would spontaneously speak it.

Over 2,500 years ago, the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus reportedly isolated two babies with goats; after two years, they uttered "bekos," a Phrygian word for "bread." The pharaoh concluded Phrygian was the original language, though critics suggest the sound more likely mimicked goats. Around 1500, Scotland's King James IV conducted a similar experiment, with children allegedly speaking Hebrew, reinforcing his belief in its divine origin.

However, a century later, Mogul emperor Akbar the Great found that children raised in silence produced no speech at all. This result is consistent with real-world cases, such as Victor and Genie, children discovered living in isolation without human speech, who developed no language. This evidence strongly indicates there is no "spontaneous" language; language acquisition requires human interaction. Consequently, reconstructing an original divine language appears impossible, a point reinforced by the biblical story of Babel confounding all earthly languages.