Eli5: When the first languages were being developed, how did everyone possibly learn and even agree on the set sounds for words?

Question

A long long time ago, humans went from grunts to some kind of primitive language then to an advance language.

How did a region possibly learn and agree that the sound “tree” for example meant that big thing over there?

Maybe my family would agree and say, but then our neighbours or tribe some 20km away?

Then for every word, tenses, grammar?!

I imagine it took a long time but I can’t even comprehend how you would transition from grunts to even a basic common language for a larger region like ancient China, Egypt, or aztecs.

They obviously did accomplish it, but how?

In: 44

Answer 1

That’s not the way language works. There weren’t meetings where they decided what to call things. Let’s go back to a very prehistoric group of humans that can make sounds, but don’t have what we would recognize as a language. One of them spots an animal that is a potential threat, and they need to communicate this to the rest of the group. Maybe they try to imitate the sound the animal makes. The rest of the group picks this up, so now whenever they need to communicate about this particular animal, they make that sound. Over time, that particular sound comes to represent that animal, it has become a word with meaning.

Obviously, one word isn’t enough to form a language, and there are lots of things that don’t make sounds to imitate. But we don’t need that. Let’s go back to our animal, whose sound has become a word. Say somebody in our group has sharpened a stick, sharp like one of the teeth of our animal. Due to this similarity, they use the same sound as the animal sound to refer to their sharpened stick. This is okay, because context lets the people in our group understand which is which. But also, again due to context, the actual vocalizations are slightly different. Over time, these vocalizations become more and more different, so now we have two words instead of one.

This process of sound becoming associated with an idea, and of old sounds being applied to new ideas, gets repeated over thousands of years (humans like us have been around for 300,000 years) and language develops. Also, as groups separate and lose contact with one another, their sounds change in different ways, which is how new languages are created out of old ones.