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.