Treatise on the Origin of Language, Johann Gottfried von Herder

Intro: Johann Herder (most people just call him Herder) was a leading figure of the German Romantic movement in the 1700s, a time when people were trying to get back in touch with natural feelings, and were criticizing the artificiality of human society. There was a big debate about how to understand language in the 1700s, the main question being–how did humans learn to speak? Did God teach them, like the Old and New Testaments claim? And if not, what does it mean that humans are the type of animal who can invent a language?
Herder wrote a lot about the significance and function of language. So, I wanted to include this opening paragraph from his book Treatise on the Origin of Language . I think it compliments Lorde’s writing–do you see any connections, or differences?
Already as an animal, the human being has language . All violent sensations of his body, and the most violent of the violent, the painful ones, and all strong passions of his soul immediately express themselves in cries, in sounds, in wild, unarticulated noises. A suffering animal, as much as the hero Philoctetes, when overcome with pain, will whine, will groan, even if it were abandoned, on a desolate island, without the sight, the trace, or the hope of a helpful fellow creature. It is as though it breathed more freely by giving vent to its burning, frightened breath ; it is as though it moaned away a part of its pain, and at least drew into itself from the empty atmosphere new forces for getting over its pain, by filling the deaf winds with groaning. This is how little nature has created us as isolated rocks, as egoistic monads! Even the finest instrument strings of animal feeling (I have to use this metaphor because I know no better for the mechanism of feeling bodies!) – even these strings, whose sound and straining does not come from volition and slow deliberation at all, indeed whose nature all of investigating reason has not yet been able to bring to light through investigation, even these are directed in their whole play, even without the consciousness of foreign sympathy, at an expression to other creatures.
Question:
1) What does Herder take to be the fundamental purpose of language? How does this compare to Plato?
2) What similarities do you see between Herder’s position, and Audre Lorde’s? Is Lorde interested in speech as a form of knowledge making as well as a form of expression?