Chimps have words for bananas and grapes.
Monkeys have words for hawk and cougar.
My cat has a word for ‘I am cold, please let me under the covers’.
Words arise from necessity. Animals use a language which works in two parts, which I call Focal:Emotional Language. It’s basically a universal language. An object has focus, a sound has an emotion. Emotions are extremely primitive, virtually all mammals are shown to have them, so it’s a pretty reliable method of communication.
‘Fire bad’ would be the ‘pain’ grunt when looking at a fire.
‘Honey is delicious’ would be poking a bit of honey comb while saying “mmm!”
Simple language is easy.
As for humans, nobody knows. Odds are our earliest language existed long before anything resembling humanity existed.
Originally written for Quora in 2018:
