For centuries, ideas about language origin have frothed up like soap bubbles, then burst into nothing. Over 2,000 years ago, the Egyptian king Psammetichus reportedly gave instructions for two new-born children to be brought up in total isolation by a shepherd in a lonely cottage. The king wanted to find out the words they would first utter, which he assumed would reveal the world's oldest race. Two years later, as the shepherd unlocked the cottage-door one day, the children ran up to him with outstretched hands, pronouncing the word bekos.

Psammetichus discovered with dismay that this was the Phrygian word for ‘bread’, and reluctantly concluded that the Phrygians predated the Egyptians. But according to John Webb, a seventeenth-century writer, Chinese was the original language of humankind.