title: [The first word?].
abstract: With regard to the very interesting book by Doris F. Jonas and A. David Jonas "Das erste Wort", some remarks are made on the problem of origin and evolution of language. Human language consists of some strata. The deepest one is the pongid stratum represented by a rest of emotionally used clicks in standard languages but well developed and enlarged in the archaic Bushman language. Each baby produces the labial click which is an instinctive phoneme resulting from the sucking movement and other clicks follow (see text). The second stratum in all languages is given by the system of the global words as mama, papa, dada which have no meaning at first so that mama gets in some languages the meaning "mother" but "father" in some others. A third old stratum is represented by a set of about 300 words (so-called elementary parallels) which are the same in nearly all languages, for example kap "to seize, to grasp, to grip". Furthermore, some notes ae made of the hypothesis given by Jonas and Jonas that in prehistoric tomes the female sex in creating of human language predominated.
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010680:Philology; D012737:Sex Factors
vernacular_title: Das erste Wort?