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.
My understanding is that the dominate theory is that there was no one singular first language. Language is older than modern homosapiens. Or it is thought so, that other species of the genus homo also had language. We actually have no hard data on this subject, that would be quite impossible without a Time Machine.
We do not think language was “created” not like tools. It appears to be something we do instinctively as a species. It arises naturally through our interactions with each other. The first sounds humans made to indicate meaning would probably have been clicking sounds, or high pitched song like sounds. As those can carry a long distance. And they probably were first used to indicate danger or food. As hunter-gatherers would be spread out across a local area, and those are the most important things to communicate in that situation. And probably the first “rules” would be that a sound indicating danger from above would be different from a sound indicating danger from below. Or that food sounds would be different from danger sounds. Or even that mating sounds would be distinct from both.
Point at thing, make noise while indicating to thing, nod in agreement that thing is called the noise. Some things stick some don’t.
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