The Steps to Speech ~ A List

Beginning with Ritualized Fire-Making, Our Earliest Utterances Acquired Meaningful Referents and the Consonant Variations to Pin Names to Them

Our hominin ancestors acquired upright posture and long legs. Very useful for long-distance travel and for seeing over the tall grasses they traveled through. Their species is called Homo erectus, Upright Human. He emerged about 2 million years ago.

Homo erectus devised pointed spears for defense, and kept them sharp by rhythmically rubbing them to-and-fro on rough surfaces while out on the hunt.

Because their hunting partners the ravens warned them of predators by squawking, Homo erectus imitated that sound for safety whenever predators were spotted.

Because continual chanting of that sound proved to be the most effective method for keeping predators away, they adopted that practice while sharpening spears. Those who did so had more babies. That practice became universal among that first tribe and all tribes who followed their example.

Because the spear points got hot and smoked when sharpened, they experimented and discovered fire-making. They showed their Chief the fire-making method. (Roughly 1 million years ago)

The Chief needed to be the sole Fire-Maker in order to keep his topmost status in the tribe. He repaid the men by giving a huge feast for the whole tribe on the Full Moon.

At the first Feast, when the chief began the rhythmic to-and-fro rubbing of the rod as if to sharpen it, the men all burst into chanting the ravens' calls exactly in time with the Chief's motions.

At the next Full Moon, and the second Feast, the people all presented valuable hand-made gifts to the House of the Chief, which the Chieftess received and arranged for viewing. She also led the women to join the chanting.

The Feasts continued on the night of every Completely Full Moon. The gifts, which became more and more elaborate, were given as thanks each time.

The tribe acquired great reverence for the generation of the fire from invisibility into light. It felt as if their chanting was part of the invisible power that was making the fire.

As they made their gifts for the House, they longed for the moon to become full.

At the feast, they felt awake and alive. The rest of the time they were silent, which seemed almost sleep-like.

Then, at the spontaneous appearance of something in nature ~ maybe a shooting star, lightning, a newborn's first cry ~ a woman may have reflexively started to chant, but cut it off after the first utterance ~ A-KAH! ~ because it would bring taboo upon them to chant outside of the Chief's worshiping feast. Others who had also seen the wonderful appearance would look at each other and wonder if taboo would come, and everything would start going wrong. But reassured by the ensuing silence and no sign of taboo, another person would echo the single “A-KAH!” Then another would, and another, until all present had affirmed that that single “A-KAH” was appropriate when witnessing the Power of Generation.

It would become a favorite activity, this naming of the Power of Generation when it was witnessed. The First Word had been born.

The whole tribe, from time to time, would participate in the new custom of Naming the Power. Sometimes walks would be taken to places where the Power was continually occurring, and people would utter the First Word before it. The tribe would feel awake ~ conscious ~ when practicing this naming, as if they'd captured some of the generating Power that they felt at the Ritual.

Being the skilled crafts-people that they were, they would see that the familiar core parts of the Ritual each had their own kind of Power. They would want to respect each of those entities ~ about ten of them ~ by saying A-KAH! when seeing things much like them. But they wanted a difference in the name for each one. The main features of the Ritual to be given a unique A-KAH name were as follows:

Power of Generation (Example: “GENerate”)

Rods (Half of the fire-making tool; Example: “CANE”)

Chanting (“CHANT”)

Grooves (The complement of the Rod; “CHANNEL, CANAL”)

Fire/Brightness (“KINdle, CANdor”)

Leader/Chief (“KING, QUEEN”)

Opposition (“CONtrast”)

Congregation (“CONGregate”)

Rhythmic to-and-fro motion (“Knead” ~ originally “KANead”)

Value/Valuables (“CENA” Slavic for “price, worth”)

After many, many Moons, these special Powers had generated descendant powers, also named with unique A-Kah! names. And those likewise, generated even more. Eventually there were about 206 unique essential powers noticed in the world and named. People agreed that they'd named everything worthy of an A-Kah! name, so no more naming was needed.

Those 206 named Primary Concepts of the Power of Generation formed the vocabulary backbone of the Fire-Making Culture. With this vocabulary, people could utter several of the Names strung together to communicate intentions, needs, and reactions. Thus a kind of First Language was born.

Since so many of the words sounded very similar if not nearly identical, the First Language was very difficult to understand. It was most useful at close range in quiet settings, such as when weaving, doing accounting and planning, and so forth.

Traders saw great opportunity for coordinating sailing actions aboard ships at sea by using the First Language, as well as for naming parts of the ships. But the First Language was woefully inadequate for such work. Too many disasters of misunderstanding ensued. (“Did Captain say 'Drop the Anchor' or 'Drop Andrew Overboard'?”)

An important vestige of the First Language that endures intact today is the name of a Ship's Captain's Rod of Command, called the Conn. As with a tribal Chief, at sea there can only be one authority of life and death. Having the Conn is the proof of that ultimate authority. Whenever a military ship's captain relinquishes his post at the helm, he passes the Conn to his replacing officer with a small verbal ceremony. The Conn, of course, is the descendant of the Chief’s fire-making spear.

Interestingly enough, the association between command of the fire's hearth and the ultimate cultural power of a whole domain is fascinatingly described in two sources. One, about the creation of the city of Athens by joining all the surrounding tribes, is a must-read by Fustel de Coulanges titled The Ancient City. The other is about the religious authority of early blacksmiths, titled The Forge and the Crucible. by Mircea (pronounced “Murcha”) Eliade.

Traders were ecstatic when the second proto-consonant was discovered being chanted while a group were rhythmically “pecking” on stone (perhaps a group of women and girls, making grinding holes). This was the labial proto-consonant, which eventually gives rise to the sounds of P, B, V, F, M and W. With this sound, unlimited amounts of novel, easily-understood vocabulary could be invented ~ and it was. Language exploded. Now everyone could talk! The language that emerged was the full-on parent of all modern languages on Earth. Linguists call it the Mother Tongue. (This happened about half a million years ago, evidenced by the sudden expansion of the nerve to the tongue around that time, accompanied ~ also suddenly ~ by the appearance of stone tools “made as if by pattern.”)

The First Language described above paved the way for the Mother Tongue to be more easily acquired. The traders' seafaring skills had grown greatly, and enabled far-flung ocean travel. They set up shops in ports around the world. A great exodus away from the tribes must have been occurring. Learning to speak would be a major attraction to relocating there.)

The collection of proto-labial-based words, in Volume II of The Global Evolution of Words, shows a profound and mysterious anomaly in the inexplicable magnitude of utterance of a single concept, uttered far more than would be normal in the course of a days' activities. It must have been used metaphorically, in a very popular song, a song that was in people’s hearts everywhere. A song about an irrevocable and mortally dangerous leaving. The esoteric metaphor used to express that parting is from the new phase of stone work, wherein a blade is struck from a core stone. One fatal mistake, and the fortune of the core-stone’s owner could be ruined. Skilled troubadours would have sung such a beautiful song the world over, and assuaged the hearts of the parents whose children and gone to the ports, and the lovers who lost their loves the same way.

Thanks to the computerized spreadsheet, we now have the first collections of the modern descendants of the proto-consonant sounds used to coin vocabulary in three main venues of activity: fire-making rituals, stone work, and logging/timbering. (The third group will hopefully be put into book form before too much time passes:-)

Thank you for being here! Don’t hesitate to send me any comments or questions. Your interest is my greatest reward.

Best wishes,

Kim Salisbury, in Bodfish, California