# Were the first sentences imperatives in human history?



## Encolpius

Good evening ladies & gentlmen, have you ever read something in linguistics dealing with the issue when cavemen started to talk, what the first phrases could have been? (Come! Go!! There!) I think it could be imperatives.   Could we answer that question at all? I have been thinking what we say when babies, we say daddy, mummy, then name things, people, animals. But did the cavemen need to name things?


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## Olaszinhok

Encolpius said:


> But did the cavemen need to name things?


They needed to name big predators for sure, particularly lions and such, there were plenty of them, even in Europe.


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## bearded

Encolpius said:


> Could we answer that question at all?


Difficult speculations!


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## Olaszinhok

I suggest reading "Sapiens" A brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I am reading this book at the moment and I'm hooked on it.


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## Encolpius

Thank your for answers and for the book Sapiens, will check it.


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## Hulalessar

Encolpius said:


> Could we answer that question at all?



No. We just do not have any evidence. No one knows when humans started speaking. The earliest evidence we have of language does not go back more than 5000 years by which time language was as developed as it is today. There are no human communities which do not have fully developed language.


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## Olaszinhok

Hulalessar said:


> not go back more than 5000 years by


So, when the first ivory figurine a "lion man" or " lioness woman" was made in Germany c. 32.000 years ago or when the first farmers started working the land in the Fertile Crescent, about 12000 years ago, they weren't able to utter any sounds, were they? I am asking this, because according to the latest historical research, _homo sapiens _managed to achieve the above results thanks to language and communication abilities.


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## Hulalessar

Olaszinhok said:


> So, when the first ivory figurine a "lion man" or " lioness woman" was made in Germany c. 32.000 years ago or when the first farmers started working the land in the Fertile Crescent, about 12000 years ago, they weren't able to utter any sounds, were they?



Not sure I understand your point. I am not saying that humans did not speak more than 5000 years ago, but that that is as far back as we can go with any certainty - and then only for a handful of languages. If the project of constructing "the first language" is doomed to fail so is any prospect of going further back to the very beginnings of language. As a scientific project it is a non-starter because there is no experiment which can be carried out or observations made to support or test any hypothesis.


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## JoMe

Hulalessar said:


> No. We just do not have any evidence. No one knows when humans started speaking. The earliest evidence we have of language does not go back more than 5000 years by which time language was as developed as it is today. There are no human communities which do not have fully developed language.


But then we can (and do) have good picture of some thousand years earlier by comparative linguistics, e.g. of Akkadian vs. other Semitic languages. This can reach 10000 years ago I guess.

Is there an accepted theory about the time 'sapientes' started having a real language, beyond 'Jongo see lion, Wingi eat fruit', which chimps apparently can also express?


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## danielstan

We may know how people spoke in the past only if they recorded their language in written sources.
As the oldest written evidence is from 5000 years ago, we may not know the languages spoken hundreds of thousands years ago.
Anything that "scientists" may imagine about the first words the cave man articulated are simple conjectures (or speculations).

On this matter I remember reading in some science fiction books (in the '80s) where the following method was experimented:
- the sound vibrations produced some 100.000 years ago in a cave were "engraved" on the walls like the music recorded on a gramophone
- they invented a kind of device to "read" the asperities of the walls in order to render these sounds

As far as I know (without making an exhaustive research on the matter) this method is theoretically feasible, but nobody could implement it yet.

Who knows if humanity will ever succeed in such endeavor?


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## Encolpius

Interesting, linguists cannot say what might have been 10 000 years ago, physicists can say what happened 15 billion years ago.


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## Hulalessar

JoMe said:


> Is there an accepted theory about the time 'sapientes' started having a real language, beyond 'Jongo see lion, Wingi eat fruit', which chimps apparently can also express?



Opinions differ.


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## se16teddy

JoMe said:


> real language


I am sure that like everything else in evolution, language developed gradually, so this is as much a question of definition as it is a question of fact. I think that even some rodents make warning calls that distinguish ground predators from flying ones: are these calls imperatives?!





danielstan said:


> the sound vibrations produced some 100.000 years ago in a cave were "engraved" on the walls like the music recorded on a gramophone
> - they invented a kind of device to "read" the asperities of the walls in order to render these sounds


I guess it is probably more likely that genetics or analysis of brain function will reveal something of how the brain specialized to develop its innate expectation to learn syntax.


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## Cenzontle

I agree that we can only speculate about language before the invention of writing.  Meanwhile,...
A. S. Diamond, in _The History and Origin of Language_ (1968), makes the case for the first words being, in effect, imperatives, for coordinating efforts on large tasks, like "Push!", "Chop!", "Lift!", etc.  The Yo-hee-ho theory of language origin.


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## francisgranada

As far as I know, the _homo sapiens_ has not changed too much from the physiological and genetic point of view from his first known appearance some 200 000 years ago. Thus, I don't find any relevant reason for supposing that he (or she) was not able to express himself/herself using a complex language, even hundreds of thousands of years ago. Further more,  it is sure that the PIE or whatever supposed proto-language, does not represent the "beginning of the human language" or the ability  of speaking  ....

As to the _imperatives_, the modern English language seems to be very similar to that of the cavemen  .... There is no (or only minimal) formal difference among various functions of the verb, so practically all the English verbs in present tense could be considered "imperatives" (to say so) .....   This fact may be the answer to your question:


Encolpius said:


> ....  what the first phrases could have been? (Come! Go!! There!) I think it could be imperatives.


I.e. no formal/grammatical distinction is necessary to express even complex things, thoughts or ideas or whatever .....


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## Awwal12

francisgranada said:


> As to the _imperatives_, the modern English language seems to be very similar to that of the cavemen  ....


English has a VERY complex syntax. And I suppose it's actually the syntax which marks the key difference between human languages and signal systems of other primates.

As for the topic, we must understand that there was no some precise moment when "cavemen started to talk". Existence of some vocal signals and even the capability of abstract thinking in terms of those signals (though many higher primates rely more on gestures) certainly must predate the homo genus as a whole. Creating a proper language was more a matter of refining those signals and creating a consistent system which allowed to combine them to express infinitely complex thoughts - and more or less unambigously decipher such combinations to understand thoughts of the others. Although the imperative usage of the more "predicative" signals had the greatest practical importance, such signals must have had a capability of being re-analyzed in a non-imperative fashion from the start, I suppose.


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## Hulalessar

se16teddy said:


> I am sure that like everything else in evolution, language developed gradually



Some take the view that once it got started it developed quickly.


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## Awwal12

The development might have been non-linear, but the popular assumption that hominids were almost unable to communicate before the appearance of the modern language is obviously false. Most higher pack animals have dozens and sometimes hundreds of distinct signals - their survival always depends on successful communication between individuals. Surely these signals aren't necessarily equal to words, but gorrillas have certainly demonstrated a capability to learn and use words of human sign languages. While the main problem of gorillas is an almost complete lack of syntax, in other aspects their usage of words demonstrates all key features of their usage among humans.


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## thegreathoo

Hulalessar said:


> *Some take the view *that once it got started it developed quickly.



In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  Full language was inherited.


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## Hulalessar

thegreathoo said:


> In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  Full language was inherited.



Here "Word" is a translation of the Greek "logos" which has a far wider range of meanings than "word". John 1:1 cannot be read as: In the beginning was language, and language was with God, and language  was God.


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## thegreathoo

Hulalessar said:


> Here "Word" is a translation of the Greek "logos" which has a far wider range of meanings than "word". John 1:1 cannot be read as: In the beginning was language, and language was with God, and language  was God.


Bottom line, I take the view it was inherited in full from parents, just like with children, and corrupted by community.


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## Hulalessar

thegreathoo said:


> Bottom line, I take the view it was inherited in full from parents, just like with children, and corrupted by community.



Are you saying that at one time language was something perfect which has since degenerated?


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## Awwal12

Hulalessar said:


> Are you saying that at one time language was something perfect which has since degenerated?


An extremely popular view among early Christian thinkers. Sadly, entirely unscientific. As a Christian, I consider a possibility that some language was once given to humans of this world, but that would have very little practical consequences anyway; pre-humans must have had quite developed signal systems, and development of any language in this world is dictated by its laws, regardless of if the language was initially perfect and given by God or not. (The story about the tower of Babel obviously cannot be taken as a fact of Earth's history.)


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## thegreathoo

Hulalessar said:


> Are you saying that at one time language was something perfect which has since degenerated?


No.  I am just saying that it was original, like an original message, and then it got corrupted in usage, in a sense that it deviated from the original as it was reproduced through usage.  Then, there is a second part which is the power to create language, which was also inherited from the parent, so new generations created new language forms in addition to reproducing (using) the inherited forms.


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## Awwal12

thegreathoo said:


> No.  I am just saying that it was original, like an original message, and then it got corrupted in usage, in a sense that it deviated from the original.


Language is a thing which exists in permanent flux with no apparent "original form" (if we don't arbitrarily define some idiom localized in space and time as a reference point). Yet again, it isn't like the said cavemen once gathered and decided to invent the first language.


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## thegreathoo

Awwal12 said:


> Language is a thing which exists in permanent flux with no apparent "original form"



That's not true even under the accepted doctrines.  PIE model is an attempt at gaining insight into one of those original forms.



Awwal12 said:


> Yet again, it isn't like the said cavemen once gathered and decided to invent the first language.



Let's not speculate about cavemen.  Maybe they did, maybe they did not decide to invent a language.  However, one thing we can claim for certain:  the cavemen (human) had the power to create language, the power which was inherited from parents, and they also therefore inherited some language.


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## Awwal12

thegreathoo said:


> That's not true even under the accepted doctrines. PIE model is an attempt at gaining insight into one of those original forms.


PIE is a pretty rough model which hardly has a direct accurate correspondence to any idiom which might have actually existed at some time. But it's not the point - any language can be "original" only compared to its later stages (with a possibility of divergence). Surely the fact that Latin once splitted into many descendant idioms which then began their independent development doesn't make that late Latin somehow more "original" than Classical Latin, or the previous stages reconstructed as proto-Italic or Proto-Indo-European. Linguists usually reconstruct proto-languages right at the point of their splitting - but nothing makes that point of time objectively "special", it's just we simply can say very little about the previous stages (in the best case we can only interpolate).


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## Awwal12

thegreathoo said:


> However, one thing we can claim for certain: the cavemen (human) had the power to create language, the power which was inherited from parents, and they also therefore inherited some language.


 Can you define "language"?


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## thegreathoo

Awwal12 said:


> Can you define "language"?


verbal communication


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## Awwal12

thegreathoo said:


> verbal communication


Then it must predate hominides (since gorillas are fully capable of knowing and using words in the broad sense of the word, that capability is very likely utilized to some extent among higher primates in the wild as well). Are words produced by mouth, hands, facial expressions or all of those is hardly relevant.


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## thegreathoo

Awwal12 said:


> Then it must predate hominides (since gorillas are fully capable of knowing and using words in the broad sense of the word, that capability is very likely utilized to some extent among higher primates in the wild as well). Are words produced by mouth, hands, facial expressions or all of those is hardly relevant.



That's fine.  Reference point can be arbitrary.  You mentioned cavemen, humans.  No need to expand discussion to non humans since the OP did not ask about that..


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## Awwal12

It's just that I am not willing to call any form of verbal communication a language. Still, your definition is as good as any, I suppose.


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