Dog's have very good hearing, and their hearing must help them to model the world around them, to understand what different objects in the world are.
So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
Then again, that must be where the origin of language evolved from in the first place.
You don’t have to have much experience with dogs to know they understand words and very basic sentences around things they care about and understand (food, going for walks, prey, “business”, approval/disapproval).
My intuition tells me that human evolution grokked language. Maybe like GPT it very quickly went from being complete gibberish to freakishly coherent. A handful of words and grammar rules leads to remarkable complexity. But that's a guess.
A bunch of workers from various countries are thrown together on a ship or some other international workplace and they develop a pigeon dialect of all their different predominate languages mashed together.
That pigeon develops and gets used for workplace needs but then these workers have families and their kids pick up that same pigeon language to talk with their friends except they need to talk about everything not just workplace stuff so they develop and advance the pigeon language and it goes from a basic rudimentary language into a full featured and complex language in a single generation even with just a few hundred speakers.
I think I've heard about it before, but my stint at university in linguistics is > 15 yrs ago, so I don't know much about it.
I remember recognozing Chomsky when later studying CS and formal language basics came up, bringing the Chomsky hierarchy.
Do you have some favorite links to share about the "step change" hypothesis? I remember reading some odd info-news article comparing brains among different species of homo; and and maybe also this particular hypothesis, but I'm not really informed.
That aside, I don't understand why this "onomatopoeia" couldn't be shared among different animals and humans:
> I think objects with these shapes make similar sounds in the real world. Sharp shapes make percussive sounds. Round shapes make softer sounds.
Claiming that animals had no language at all would obviously be false. But we still have reason to think (?) that the human languages are intertwined with the intelligence gap we observe between humans and other mammals.
We have examples of people trying to invent languages in modern times, and it does not appear to be a fast process. The first people doing it would have the additional struggles of having no prior examples, no ability to take notes (writing having not yet been invented), and having to teach others to talk for the first time.
Pi, Pie, Pide, Pita, Pizza, Piadina, Pirog (Russian for "pie"), Piscina (circular basin), Pipe.
Also, some Russian words for organs that have to do with piss (which are naturally circular) also start with "Pi".
None of this is scientific (at least, not my attempts to describe it), and I don't have a good explanation for every swear or epithet, but I don't think it would be as satisfying to say "that's lubu!" instead of "that's caca!"
There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
Edit - it seems there's evidence that this intuitive explanation is wrong, see the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146562
This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
Is it? I used to think so myself, but nowadays I realize my reaction was just imitating what others had shown me was an “appropriate” response to this.
Whether there are 4 fundamental forces, a single one, or 100, none of these help me understand the world in any sense I actually care about.
By the way, this mode of being makes me happier so I invite everyone to take a second and actually consider the question "how is this magical?" for everything. It can be a beautiful experience.
I've met amazing buddhist masters who have meditated for decades that describe the world in these terms. They are also the happiest and the people most oriented towards helping others that I've met.
Now what? What am I supposed to feel awe about? Are you sure you aren’t just echoing words you’ve read in a popular science book?
To be clear, I have myself parroted such soundbites for decades. But at some point I asked myself what I was actually trying to say when I said them, and came up empty.
I do find it interesting the fact that there's some kind of order that happens to make the world the way it is and not some other way. That's enough.
It’s part of why time seems to accelerate when you age too our brains only record novelty and new experiences. Drive the thousandth time to the store, won’t remember even going. Do something new - suddenly the weekend seems long.
But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat
Mexican / Spanish its Guau-guau or "wow-wow". Russia its tyaf-tyaf. Mandarin Chinese its wāng wāng. Few if any cultures that don't speak English know what 'woof' is.
I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.
We can't tell a story about our sensory experience without first drawing arbitrary distinctions to divide it, and objectifying those distinctions. The very notion of a percussive sound is dependent on our arbitrary differentiation of that pattern as separate from other sound experiences. That boundary isn't discovered, it's optimized. The fact that we can categorize so many different instances of sound as "sharp" isn't because sharpness was already an inherent object to discover: it's because our notion of "sharp" has been optimized to match many instances of a consistent pattern. We eventually use the same word for sharp flavor, because that relative similarity in experience is the implication we are communicating in the first place.
A sharp object will always make a sharp sound. This is an objectively true implication: that same object won't suddenly make a dull sound, because sound is physically shaped by the objects it moves through. The mistake is to assume this objectivity extends to the very definition of those objects. We could just as easily tell a story about a blarp object, where "blarp" means sharp and blue. That boundary is perfectly valid as an object in a story: it's just sub-optimal, because the experience of blue is irrelevant to the experience of sharpness. Every time we compare blarp objects with others, we are wasting effort, carrying the baggage of redundant blueness. We do this all the time, and we don't like it. Language will never be perfectly efficient, because there are too many subjects involved to relate them all precisely; and too much commitment to familiarity to update the language quickly.
At least in parrots, they love playing with sounds. They'll bang things, tap on things, throw things around, and even scream into different objects just to hear the difference. They also have decent object permanence, speaking anecdotally.
You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.