Reading Rousseau

Discourse on the origin of inequality by Rousseau (pg 46)

talking about "the savage man"

"The only evils he fears are pain and hunger.  I say pain and not death because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions that man has made in withdrawing from the animal condition."  Death then, according to Rousseau, is a sign of humanness, of society.  This reminds me of a few lines from a Bruce Nauman video, "Good Boy, Bad Boy."  The lines of importance are: "I don't want to die.  You don't to die.  We don't want to die.  THIS IS FEAR OF DEATH!"  

At what point did the creation of language become necessary, Rousseau asks.  He does ignore, however, the "evolution" (for lack of a better word) from communication (gestures, cries) to language?  This is odd because language evolves and always is so there is no "point at which..."

He sees also a conundrum: "for if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had still a greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking" pg 49

and "which was the more necessary: an already formed society for the invention of languages, or an already invented language for the establishment of society" pg 51.  Unfortunately, I doubt this is a "which came first?  The chicken or the egg?" scenario.  Again, communication and society developed together most likely.  

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The statement "That is what he means, but that isn't what he's saying!"  But then, how do I know what he means if he does not mean what he says?