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. Allowing humans to make a connection between a sound and the thing producing that sound.
This leads to the idea that primitive words derive from imitations of the natural sounds that early men and women heard around them.
The “Bow-Wow” Theory:
making a C AW - C AW or C O O - C O O sound, the early human tried to imitate the sounds and then used them to refer to those objects even when they weren’t present.
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 words containing sounds similar to the noises they describe.
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.
The “Pooh-Pooh” Theory:
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.
We normally produce spoken language as we breathe out, so we speak while we exhale, not inhale.