In praise of history’s famous first words

More instances of a dying person’s final utterances — their last words, called “famous” if the speaker is prominent or notable or the words themselves wry or ironic — are inscribed in the public record than any baby’s first words. As a counterbalance, let me suggest a few first words spoken by young humans that deserve to be better known, if not given pedestals in their own right because, in their way, they helped make our world.

A good candidate is the first actual first word from a baby ever recorded. It dates to 1602 when a doctor named Jean Héroard wrote it down — as he wrote down every burp, meal, bowel movement, and outing in the life of his charge, the French dauphin who would grow up to become Louis XIII. According to Héroard’s records, it was eight o’clock in the morning, and a servant was arriving at the palace for work when the baby shouted hé, or “hey.” 

Héroard doesn’t label hé a first word, though. This he reserves for an exchange months earlier when a wet nurse teased the prince: “Well, sire, when I am very old and go with a stick, will you love me more?” Said the baby, “No” — which had to be a mere burp or babble given that the baby was only four months old and too young to know how to mean.

If 1602 seems relatively late for someone to record a baby’s first word, given that human babies have been producing them for hundreds of thousands of years, I agree. It’s possible that a first word was mentioned in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Tamil, or even Sanskrit, written on an object or surface that’s been destroyed or forgotten. I’d love to find it.

I do know that expecting a baby’s first word isn’t universal. Neither is making any hoopla about it when it happens because any sustained attention to infants beyond what keeps them alive isn’t intrinsic to parenting. In many societies, other milestones, such as patience, reciting kinship lineages, or even a laugh, take precedence over linguistic achievements. For most of human history, parents, and particularly mothers, had more important things to do than surveil their babies for linguistic powers. Thus, it’s not surprising that the first recorded word I found came from a royal court.

Another famous first word is an ancient one, bekos, which I hesitate to give any attention to because it’s not an actual first word. However, it does show that ancient people were cognizant of infants’ linguistic threshold, and they certainly recognized that young children could talk. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus I, who lived from 664 to 610 BC, wanted to determine how far back in time his people stretched. He instructed two children to be raised in isolation, kept safe but never spoken to.

“He wished to hear from those children, as soon as they were done with meaningless noises,” Herodotus wrote in The Histories hundreds of years later, “which language they would speak first.” 

The Pharaoh figured this would be the original, “natural” language of humanity. As the story goes, after two years, the children reached out to their guardian, a goatherd, and said “Bekos.” Psammetichus interpreted this expression as the Phrygian word for “bread” and concluded that those people, not the Egyptians, had the older pedigree. Bekos itself is not as remarkable as its role in a 2700-year-old anecdote that’s been used to describe ancient attitudes toward children, the linguistic preoccupations of the Greeks, and the ethics of language experiments involving children.

Among actual first words, another famous one is tem, a baby version of the French salutation tiens, which was spoken by Geneviève Taine, a young French girl, and recorded by her father, the French intellectual Hippolyte Taine. In an essay about her language development published in 1877, “On the Acquisition of Language by Infants and the Human Species,” he unpacked tem, a “remarkable” word, with immense paternal pride. 

It “now signifies for her give, take, look,” the father wrote, “in fact she says it very decidedly several times together in an urgent fashion, sometimes that she may have some new object that she sees, sometimes to get us to take it, sometimes to draw attention to herself. All these meanings are mixed up in the word tem.” I can sense Taine’s delight at how the word represented an “outbreak of volition” from his daughter. As a father, I shared his sadness when Geneviève stopped saying it. “This is no doubt because we did not choose to learn it, for it did not correspond to any one of our ideas … we did not use it with her and therefore she left off using it herself.” 

Not unreasonably, Taine thought his daughter was recapitulating the language of the distant past, saying that such a word, baggy with meaning and spoken with force, as primitive humans must have done. This notion — that children represented earlier stages of cultural evolution — was already prominent in biology. Taine just extended it to language from embryology, which makes tem the first first word to be used in an evolutionary argument, peering into the distant human past. 

Tem is also famous for what it prompted: When Taine’s article was translated into English, Charles Darwin published contents of a diary he’d kept in 1839 of his son William’s development, which contains another famous first word, mum (meaning “food”). “And now instead of beginning to cry when he was hungry,” Darwin wrote, “he used this word in a demonstrative manner or as a verb, implying ‘give me food.’” 

Darwin’s article appeared in German, Russian, and English at the same time, creating a transatlantic fad of child diary-keeping among natural historians — most of whom were men suddenly visiting their home nurseries, writing down observations, and publishing the diaries. 

“The importance of Darwin’s paper was not so much in its content but in the fact that in one swoop it made the study of child development a respectable branch of human biology,” writes Willem Levelt in A History of Psycholinguistics. The scientific interest in child development that Darwin’s article sparked led to new sciences of development, new types of parenting expertise, and from there the obsessive parenting cultures and consumer markets all targeting a baby’s unique potential — and its family’s economic fears and dreams.

Most of those diaries revealed first words that were unextraordinary as words. But let’s be honest: The words your child or children produce are the most famous ones simply because it’s them. Linguists who track such things say that in English, the most frequent first ten words are mommy, daddy, ball, bye, hi, no, dog, baby, woof-woof, and banana — though your child’s first words may vary. 

In fact you, as the parent, get to decide what’s “first.” One certainly may get more pleasure out of debating the meaning of this or that babbled utterance than telling the story of the One True First Word.