It sounds to me it’s saying you had to do things like clap your hands to get their attention, gesture to communicate what you wanted them to do, and that you had to do so kindly and patiently or else they may not respond well. Alternatively, maybe it was the children who had to clap their hands and gesture, but then I’m not sure how they’d speak blandishments (kind, gentle encouragements, like “good job!”) to others.
According to Wikipedia:
“The experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles, who was generally extremely negative about Fredrick II (portraying his calamities as parallel to the Biblical plagues in The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II) and wrote that Frederick encouraged ‘foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which he took to have been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.’”
So, as you’d expect of someone raised without any formal language, other means of communication were necessary.
I’ve heard the shape of the head on the human penis might also be intended to scoop out other dude’s spunk so you have a better chance of passing on your own genes instead. Apparently cavewomen were just having trains run on them all the time, I guess.
No, this passage is describing the care they needed.
It doesn’t make any sense as an interpretation to jump right to death if you look at what the passage actually says. They died because they couldn’t clap their hands? They died because they or their caretakers didn’t smile enough (gladness of countenance)? They died because they didn’t get enough gentle encouragement from their caretakers (blandishments)?
This was from a list of fucked up things Frederick II did written by a guy who hated him. If the kids had died as a result of the experiment, surely it’d say so. It’s just saying the experiment was a a failure (labors were in vain) because of course they did not spontaneously start speaking Hebrew, Greek, Latin and instead had to rely on nonverbal communication.
If someone says “I can’t live without my phone,” they aren’t going to literally drop dead one day if they forget it at home.
If you have a source laying around for info on the kids’ deaths, I’d take it.