Here is an interesting little thing to sit and think about for however long you allow yourself. My communications teacher last semester was talking to us about verbal and nonverbal communication and revealed to us this scholastic debate that has been going on for many decades and that is this..."which came first...thoughts...or words".
There are the scholars that believe without thoughts no words would have been able to come into existance and that even animals who have no pattern of "speach" still have the ability to think logically.
And then there are the scholars who believe that man began having thoughts after being able to form words with the evidence that a culture that doesn't have a certain word for something feels no lacking from the absence of this word. For example...A sailor could have fifty different words for the type of waves seen on the ocean while the landlover has one. However that last statement of mine is going more into how ones culture affects ones language..
Give me your thoughts on this subject because it is perplexing I keep going back and forth.

i think it solely depends on how you want to define thoughts.......thoughts to understand, well then yes, for if two ancient ya-ha's were talking to each other, they obviously understand that this other ya-ha is speaking......i think thoughts had to come first, i cannot think of any example that would imply words coming first......

I fully believe that animals can think and that humans weren`t always as dependant on words as we are now. Thought came first.

native americans actually had a very detailed sign language for talking to other tribes when necessary...so i feel that the hands were the first to come...however thought i believe has always been since man first stepped up on two legs and the "I AM" came to be.

it didn't take me more than a few seconds to decide that thoughts came first. without thoughts, you cannot have words. even if words did exisist somehow, without thoughts, you could not recognise them as words.

words are one way of expressing your thoughts, but i dont believe that they make thoughts at all.

That makes sense. Even if you did have words before thoughts, they wouldn't have any meaning or significance.

Thoughts are independant of words...our internal views tend to automaticaly be transcribed into language to make it easier to understand and communicate to others of the species.

Dreams are an example of thought untranslated as they don't need to be when asleep and no communication is possible, they lack the guidence of outside stimuli and without a logical narrative thier progression is chaotic.

In studies of chimps a banana was hung from a cieling in a room filled with boxes...without words the chimps still were able to stack the boxes in order to reach the banana. This shows thought and a logical process without words.

the chicken.

I also believe that thoughts came first. I find it very hard to believe that humans were once without thoughts... Its almost impossible for me now to clear my mind enough, and not have at least one thought there. Its almost never blank. Something has to be there. Without thoughts, how were we able to recognize words in the first place. We had to be able to think of ways to communicate, which means there was thought process involved. almost everything involves some way of thinking. No matter if it was trying to survive, such as thinking that one needs water, so they go out and find it.
Im almost positive humans have always been able to think, no matter if words were possible yet or not.

Dust

It all depends on what speech is defined as. Roughly, speech is nothing more than noise we make. We don't even think when we make noise at the start, in fact all we do is make noise since that's instinctive. Therefore, in a sense, speech does come first..if you consider any noise we make speech..which it roughly is.

interesting point Preston (nice to see ya back, by the way)... but while i agree that instinct is a form of communication, i have trouble with it being speech.

That is why you would have to define speech, Errant. Definitions are what make or break debates.

The instinct to make noise as a child is simply to announce your presence and demand care and attention.

However to say that communication in the form of speach is just the noises we make is wrong. Speach contains a great deal of information, more information than simple sounds such as a scream or a laugh. Many animals share these simple forms with us but few share what could be deemed a language, though there are species that do.

To find out how speach works you have to understand how a child or an animal learns to assocciate an idea with a word. It becomes obvious that there must be a thought there first to provide a framework for language.

Actually, most words for the English language derived from different languages, which in turn derived from the babies themselves that were born. The parents decided to make words from what the babies mumbled, that way they could feel proud of their children, and thus a language was slowly strung together. Therefore those instinctive noises could in fact be considered speech since they are what the language we use derives from.

By the way, I thought nudity in an avatar wasn't allowed?