Basically the title. Languages often have complex rules and a lot of words. How everyone agreed on them? And together created the languages? What process did they go through?
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Educated guess here: Based on what has been seen in animals, the first languages were likely warning calls. Animals that live in groups have been observed using distinct calls to warn their group of different threatening animals. It’s important to know whether the threat is from below or above so having distinct calls for “snake” and “eagle” can be important.
So then slowly more sounds are developed for different threats, but also they start getting used for food and water, as in “food this way” (so we should go this way).
And it keeps expanding.
Speculating a bit more, perhaps warnings come from combining two capabilities: copying and lying.
Animals will lie sometimes. They may try to mislead a predator away from babies by walking a different direction. Or try to mislead a competitor about the presence of food.
And if an animal notices that others in its group always act a certain way when a threat is near, the animal will learn to react to that behavior even if the animal hasn’t seen the threat itself.
Now combine those two behaviors to protect some offspring. An animal wants the offspring to act a certain way, so the animal behaves a certain way knowing that the offspring will react. That’s communication.
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