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.
Another of Jespersen’s nicknames was the “pooh-pooh” theory, which proposed that
speech developed from the instinctive sounds people make in emotional circumstances.
That is, the original sounds of language may have come from natural cries
of emotion such as pain, anger and joy. By this route, presumably, Ouch! came to have
its painful connotations. But Ouch! and other interjections such as Ah!, Ooh!, Phew!,
Wow! or Yuck! are usually produced with sudden intakes of breath, which is the
opposite of ordinary talk. We normally produce spoken language as we breathe out,
so we speak while we exhale, not inhale. In other words, the expressive noises people
make in emotional reactions contain sounds that are not otherwise used in speech
production and consequently would seem to be rather unlikely candidates as source
sounds for language.