The Self-Referential

The Phonetic, The Figurative, and the Descriptive.

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The human language developed so far through millennia might have been the result of man's attempts at describing his feelings, verbally and through gestures in the beginning.

Naturally, first through gestures, men might have tried to convey their most simple feelings like fear and affection but then hatred, threatening, anger, envy and jealousy also. 

Then they might have discovered how to show through imitative words many a objects sentient or insentient. This way the human could express so many of their ideas.

We can't say when man successfully knew that in order to identify a certain object or a person, name could be assiciated to the form of that person or object,  -sentient or insentient.

However once he found out that a certain phoneme could be associated with a certain object and then an aggregate of these various phonemes could be compounded in a sequence so as to enable him distinguishing those objects he must had great joy and exhilaration.

Many might have done this at many places and at different times and they might have invented the first spoken language of their tribe.

They might have tried assigning names to things and people as well. Then they might have felt that there should be different words to denote one-another in mutual conversation. 

However, they might have felt bewildered and embarrassed when they had to point out oneself by the same name that others used for calling one.

We can see that in comparison to 'He' and 'You', the self-referential pronoun 'I' must have been a late-comer for them.

Finally they might have arrived at and agreed at that the expression / pronoun 'I' could be used by each and everyone of them conveniently, while pointing out oneself, and irrespective of their name. 

That must have been how the illusion of taking oneself a person might have entered the mind / consciousness of man.

It is not that before acquiring this indicator, one didn't exist and was not aware of the existence of oneself, but only after naming oneself as 'I', one had a sense of oneself and took himself as this very person, he calls by 'I'.

Looks a bit awkward, but that is how this 'I' then transformed into 'We', and the consciousness of the individual into the collective.

From the collective then grew up the cults and the culture.

In the process man utterly forgot what is this  'self' or the 'essential self', if any, that he Is. 

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