Language's First Use

Why do people talk? That is the central question of this blog: what was the purpose of the utterance, the first time somebody said something? I have been taking it for granted that the first intention wasinformative, as inenemy orcarcass thataway. But other ambitions are possible. Maybe language began with acurse or aprayer. I seem to recall reading in Stephen Pinker that cursing uses a different part of the brain, so perhaps we can toss that purpose aside. But was the first utterance a prayer?That doesn ’t look impossible. ImagineHomo earlymus on a vast, grassy plain surrounded by barking hyenas. It looks like a good time for a prayer. But prayers require a concept of at least a higher power, and such a concept seems unlikely to arise without there already being a language with which towork out the notion of some kind of power to pray to. It seems a secondary reason to speak, that is a reason to be discovered by a person already endowed with speech.Actually, it seems like a tertiary reason. You have language (for whatever purpose) and then you develop the ability to work or reason out such things as there must be a god of the hyenas, and then you start praying   to said god to call off his earthly manifestations. But if prayer is too advanced a reason for using language, we cannot assume our ancestor trapped on  the African savanna was forced into silence. He/She might have cried out with some sort ofmagical purpose – sayabracadabra and the hyenas will leave. Yet even ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs