The other night before I went to bed I had a little vision of tribesman communicating to one another in a peculiar way. I drew a picture of Pac-man to not forget it, and luckily I just found it :)
In my daydream (Awake nightdream?) I saw what looked to be south american tribesman communicating via a strange mix of: Mouth positioning, Pitches/tones, and Facial expressions.
- The Mouth positioning served to function as a dictator to who was being meant: Fully open and stretched meant I/Me, Half open meant He/She/It, Barely open meant You/You
- Pitches/tones were Onomotopeia acknowledged by the community.
- Facial expression means "The thing" Or "The concept of the thing"; Say the tribesman roared, well a scrunched up face would mean "bear, tiger" or something, but a wide open 'Aha!' Face would mean the concept of burliness and strength.
A tool was developed to facilitate understanding: Mimicry combined with bodily gesture, whatever sound couldn't describe cogently, a type of interpretive dance (More so just extreme gesturing) would supplement the shortfalls.
My daydream even went into a second daydream where I imagined this form of language development was unique in that it had origin in the desire to strengthen the jaw so the tribe would evolve pronounced jaws to look like their founder.
What this made me think of was the beginning of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Inquiries, where he talks about a language game dedicated to giving directions and receiving them. Out of necessity for an old culture to evolve and communicate.
That little flashback recollection in relation to what I wrote here made me think just now that it is very likely 'language' began in fragmented functional sections that each had its own ritualized procession to prevent misunderstanding. Society therefore could have early on been set up in such a way that is harsh and roundabout, but the main goal is to facilitate all the types of communication and stamp out misunderstanding. But, doing this creates the conditions necessary to create a more or less fluent system of communication!