What is the philosophy of words in languages?

Question

It has always been a question for me that when we humans did not have a language to communicate with each other and then we needed to create a language to communicate with each other, how exactly did we create words for objects and different things in general?

For example, consider a word like "water" in English. Well, we know that this word (and in general, almost all words) was not like this from the beginning. For example, maybe the root of this word is the word "wet" or another word. Anyway, how did an early human decide to choose a word like "water" for water?

Well, I know that language is just an appointment so that we can communicate with each other, but the appointment has a reason and it does not happen without a reason.

Imagine that you are a person who doesn't know any language and now you want to create a language for yourself. After defining the alphabet of your language, you now need to make words for different things. How do you do this? How and for what reason did early humans choose a word like "God" for example for God?

(This question may be similar to "What is the consensus on how wards are formed across cultures generally?", but I'm not sure and the answer there doesn't answer mine either.)

Answer 1

There was no time when humans were humans and needed to communicate with each other but had no words, so have to somehow invent words. The question inverts horse and cart: because we have words, we can do things with them, like "communicate" with other humans.

In imagining that I am a person who doesn't know any language and now I want to create a language for myself, you are adjacent to the notorious Bickerton thought-experiment about taking infants to a desert island, leaving them with only non-communicative adults, and seeing what sort of "language" develops spontaneously.

The closest that you can come to that scenario is in deaf communities where children can't learn the ambient spoken language, but there are enough of them (as opposed to just one deaf child in the village), that theoretically one can (could have) observe them inventing a language. Normally, nowadays, deaf children learn a signed language from other signers in the community, just as hearing children learn the local spoken language from others who already know the language. We have never had the opportunity to passively watch the process of sign-language creation by a community of deaf children, so we really don't know how they do it, we just know that they did it.

We learn the word for "water" from others who know the language. It is "water" now because it was "water" 50 years ago, and 100 years ago, and so on with some minor changes in pronunciation (going back 6000 or so years to something like wodr). Sometimes words are replaced with other words, for example the original word for "dog" has been reduced in English to a more specialized word "hound", and the original word for "horse" was completely lost except via Latin, Greek and Sanskrit borrowings.