A quite different view of the beginnings of language is based on the concept of natural
sounds.
The human auditory system is already functioning before birth (at around seven months).
Among several nicknames that he invented to talk about the origins of speech,
Jespersen (1922) called this idea the “bow-wow” theory.
In this scenario, when different objects flew by, making a Caw-Caw or Coo-Coo
sound, the early human tried to imitate the sounds and then used them to refer to
those objects even when they weren’t present.
The fact that all modern languages
have some words with pronunciations that seem to echo naturally occurring sounds
could be used to support this theory. In English, in addition to cuckoo, we have splash,
bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss, screech, and of course bow-wow.
Words that sound similar to the noises they describe are examples of
onomatopeia. While it is true that a number of words in any language are onomatopoeic,
it is hard to see how most of the soundless things (e.g. “low branch”) as well as
abstract concepts (e.g. “truth”) could have been referred to in a language that simply
echoed natural sounds. We might also be rather skeptical about a view that seems to
assume that a language is only a set of words used as “names” for things.