The word eaters

[Jaroslaw]

Greetings!

My name is Jaroslaw Jozefowicz. I am analyzing  phonosemantic patterns of Indo-European languages, and searching for reflections of perceptual experiences recorded by language.
Although, for obvious reasons, I am unable to evaluate all of the IE-tongues, the gathered observations are strikingly similar, revealing that IE-vocabularies contain all phases of their development, starting with a set of simple ideophones which were created by vocalizing sequences of ingestive movements, respiratory actions and by mimicking noises (with the vocalizations deriving from ingestion being the prevailing ones).

The early levels of vocabulary reflect an almost animal-like lifestyle, very much unlike the one of the pastoralists, that is usually discussed in connection with the first Indo-Europeans.
 
The meanings of the earliest words do not reflect any visual stimuli, while the early derivations define visual phenomena in terms of touch, taste and sound - so it soundns like the initial vocabulary was developed in a lightless environment (or was created by someone who was blind), to compensate for the impossibility of visual communication.

The link below leads to my article which contains the few most important observations and introduces the essential principles that underlie the initial development of language.

http://www.electricmood.com/wordeaters.htm

Thought most of the described observations were made on Polish and the publication deals only with the phonosemmantic structure of Indo-European languages, I suspect at least some of the non-Indo-European languages to have been developed in a similar way, as several observed machanisms of making words seem to be universal.

I look forward to any comments you may post

[trehinp]

For some reasons, I missed your initial post... Hence this late answer. Sorry.

I've just been on your website and find some of your hypothesis quite challenging.

May I suggest that your might explore one additional avenue which is early echolalia, repeating sounds exactly as they were heard, phenomenon found in almost all young infants, probably as the result of miror neurons activation. It tends to disapear as the child grows out of infancy, about at the same age as the child develops the first levels of "theory of mind.

This echolalia is also very frequent in people with autism,  however, unlike in the "normal" child it is often persistant in adolescence and in adulthood. These adults reproducing quite perfectly the sounds of nature may have been at the origin of some onopatopeic words which in turn would have been picked up by the rest of the "tribe", probably with less perfection in the reproduction but enough to be understood.

Note the another frequent trait among autistic individuals ifs the invention of neologisms. In general it is because they have difficulties with caterorisations and can't stand that two different objects be called the same, when for us since they belong to a same category, we find natural to use the same word. This caracteristic may have induced them to give names to small subgroups of categories.

OK, That's just a rough "thinking out loud"  brain storming starter.

I'd be interested to have your thoughts about it.

Paul TREHIN