In the time before languages had names, there was a woman who lost the first thing she had loved.
This had never happened before. Until that moment, all things that existed had continued to exist. She did not know what to call what had happened, because no word had been made for it. She opened her mouth and what came out was not a scream and not a word but something between them: a sound that was both the fact of the thing being gone and the exact shape of how it had been there.
A man nearby heard her and understood. He had not yet lost anything himself, but the sound reached him and he knew precisely what she was saying: the specific texture of the absence, the weight of the before, the way the present had been rearranged by the missing thing.
He said something back to her, in the same sound-space she had made. She understood him.
They spoke for a long time this way, the woman and the man, about what was gone and what it had been and what the world looked like from inside the loss. When they had said everything there was to say, they stopped. The sound-space closed.
Later, when the man lost something of his own, he cried, and a boy nearby heard him, and understood him, and answered in kind.
This is how the language spread: from one loss to the next, carried not in the mouth but in the water that comes from the eye, which is the older and more honest organ. The words exist in the grief itself. You do not learn the language. You arrive in it.