eli5 How did “words” come to be before any language was developed? Like before words existed how did a group of people just collectively decide a banana is a banana and not a “ksirjrnwpx”
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So first and most obviously foremost is that all language is arbitrary and is spawned out of necessity or utility.
There are some sort of modern day spontaneous pidgin languages that people have used to communicate with eachother but I can’t immediately find a good example. But I know that these examples can give good perspective about how language can form so it’s something worth looking into.
But when I studied linguistics in upper level academia, the received wisdom of how any of this started came down to pointing.
Some people pointed to a thing and uttered a sound and several others agreed that this utterance was how we referred to the thing. I think it’s no more complicated than that.
Eventually we started to codify it but in its infancy it’s just pointing at a thing and making a sound, and community mutually agreeing that the sound indicated the thing
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