Carl Wieland Used Two Bad Arguments

Carl Wieland Used Two Bad Arguments · How Close is the Jimmy Akin Model to the Urantia Book? · Could Pius XII claim assent of opinion to "the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid" in § 36?

Here is his article, it's reposted "today" on CMI (actually tomorrow's date, but it's already tomorrow's date in Australia), here:

Has an ape learned to talk?
by Carl Wieland | This article is from
Creation 25(3):52–53, June 2003
https://creation.com/has-an-ape-learned-to-talk

Here is bad argument 1:

An ape’s larynx simply does not have that capability. For example, it can’t make the fundamental vowels (a, o, i, etc.) of the human language.

The reason this is irrelevant for capacity for language, as such, rather than for a specific* language, is, languages have different sound palettes. The sound that apes most audibly make would count as vowels. Not differentiated, fundamental vowels, but nevertheless vowels. One human language seems to have only two phonematically different vowels (though lots of versions made pertinent as per stress and surrounding consonants), so, having only one is not an obstacle to human language as such, only to human languages that we have.

But it can be completed into a fairly good argument against apes learning language anyway. Here is how.

Human language has three basic levels. The full sentense, usually breaks down into more than one morpheme. The morpheme, usually breaks down into more than one phoneme. And finally the phoneme. The full sentence or phrase makes the complete sense of a message. The morpheme by itself makes the incomplete sense of a message component like a concept or metaconcept. The phoneme by itself makes no sense, but differentiates morphemes that make different sense. But this means, the phonemes have to be a repertoir.

Now, differentiating vowels is out for the reason that Carl Wieland mentioned.

Differentiating consonants is also out for another reason, the ape's ear captures so low frequencies that hearing certain consonants is impossible.

Now, bad argument 2:

When many deaf children in Nicaragua were raised together in an environment without any spoken language input, they spontaneously developed their own highly complex sign language, complete with rules of grammar and syntax.

This is Communist fake news.

In fact, they had all had some input of at least improvised sign language from their homes, meaning they had been exposed to language input.

What they did was only equallising this into a common language.

The fake news foregoes the fact that children growing up without any human language input at all, during the relevant years, will grow bodily, but will not later be able to catch up with learning human language. If the growing up with beasts occurs after language acquisition has already taken place, the child will recover language if taken to human environments. But if the language acquisition had not yet taken place ...

Meet the 8-year-old girl raised by monkeys
By Gabrielle Fonrouge, April 6, 2017 10:33am
https://nypost.com/2017/04/06/meet-the-8-year-old-girl-raised-by-monkeys/

Two of these had already learned language, apparently the ten year old boy who had been with goats only two years, certainly the first, who didn't come in with capuchin monkeys before five, and one may have been rescured just in time, but for the other three it looks bleak in these cases:

The Week : 6 cases of children being raised by animals
https://theweek.com/articles/471164/6-cases-children-being-raised-by-animals

huck : 'FERAL CHILDREN': ABANDONED BY PARENTS AND RAISED BY ANIMALS
Friday 10 March, 2017, Text by Michael Segalov, Photography by Julia Fullerton-Batten
https://www.huckmag.com/article/stories-feral-children-abandoned-nature-raised-animals

If human babies could develop real language on their own, then Chomsky's atheist** view on human development would be viable. Once mutations had developed the human brain into a certain direction, that brain could, via toddlers creating their talk together, create human language.

This is not so. Barring miracles, and God creating a full grown Adam with a full grown not just language capacity, but even language mastery, that counts as a miracle, the only way for a human baby to acquire human language is via surroundings already having such, and this at very specific times in the baby's development, the transition, basically from baby to toddler. And this is precisely what mutations cannot provide. The human brain already has what's necessary, and feral children still don't learn language when rescued, unless they get rescued a short while after getting feral, or they got into this situation when already toddlers and having some speech. This is a nail in the coffin, not just for Atheistic Evolution, as it is impossible, but for Theistic Evolution too, as it would have made God cruel to His image Adam, before he sinned.

But some medical doctors have a certain degree of professionally conditioned Dunning Kruger about certain subjects outside medicine proper.
/Hans Georg

* It would be relevant for specific languages, but researchers could try to create vowel-poor dialects of these.
** While Chomsky is himself agnostic, while his view has been labelled as "creationist" by fellow Evolution believers, his view on how men became men is an atheistic view insofar as if God existed, on this view, He would be irrelevant.