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In his quest for the origin of the primal name, the first word uttered by man, the author investigates language from the standpoint of its development in early childhood, in the history of mankind, and in the history of religion in particular. Gesture came before speech and speech represents an inhibition and translation of gesture. One theory of the origin of speech is the bow-wow theory, that it is onomatopoeia. Another theory asserts that the first words were calls of allurement, calls for help, warnings, and war cries. The Sterns in 1907 showed from observations of infants that one-word syllables voice the wish to possess the mother, and Schilder concluded from this that primitive language is partly expressive movement and partly magic action.
Feldman speculates that the thunderous sounds made by the murdered father were re-experienced in dreams that added the visual lightninglike effects and that the sound uttered by the dying father would have been YO or You, Iaoue, thus accounting for the forbidden and death-dealing original religious name of the deity; Yahu, JwHw, Yahweh. The lightninglike effects account for the halo around the deity and are included in the case example that the author describes. He traces the development of the primal name of the deity through some ten ancient and three modern languages.