I'm going to do several posts - some information that several others apparently 'could not be bothered with' from www.creationscience.com Part 1. Part 1 contains more than 1-2 anomolies with TOE (so don't shoot the messenger). This site is well researched. Anytime you see the lowercase letter (these subscripts do not appear above/below the line due to copy/paste problems) they provide more information to other books and articles.
13. Language
Children as young as seven months can understand and learn grammatical rules.a Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that language is learned only from other humans; humans do not automatically speak. So the first humans must have been endowed with a language ability. There is no evidence language evolved.b
Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees and gorillas to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by editing the animals’ successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer’s hidden promptings.c)
Wild apes have not shown these vocabulary skills, and trained apes do not pass their vocabulary on to others. When a trained animal dies, so does the trainer’s investment. Also, trained apes have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No known evidence shows that language exists or evolves in nonhumans, but all known human groups have language.d
Furthermore, only humans have different modes of language: speaking/hearing, writing/reading, signing, touch (as with braille), and tapping (as with Morse code or tap-codes used by prisoners). When one mode is prevented, as with the loss of hearing, others can be used.e
If language evolved, the earliest languages should be the simplest. But language studies show that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, verb form, and inflection. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler instead of more complex.f Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.g [See Figure 140 on page 263.]
If humans evolved, then so did language. Because all available evidence indicates that language did not evolve, then humans probably did not evolve.
Would it trouble you to know that starlings share the same innate ability to understand recursive grammar that we have, but the other great apes do not?
Are those studies of written language? I mean, those civilisations who spoke those older languages would have to be evolved enough to have developed a written form? You don't think writing evolved hand-in-hand with speech?
There was a Tower, somewhere in Babylon.....
Genesis 11
1. Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
2. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3. They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
4. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
5. But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
6. The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
7. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
8. So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
9. That is why it was called Babel --because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
"If humans evolved, then so did language."
Exactly.
"Because all available evidence indicates that language did not evolve, then humans probably did not evolve."
All available evidence is written. By the time a language develops a written form, it must, by definition, be pretty complex. Can you go back in time a few 10's of thousands of years, and study the languages/communications of the time?
Incidentally, ever studied any cave drawings? They sure seem like a primitive precursor to written language to me. Doesn't that show an evolution of language skills?
Languages don't evolve? What a silly thing to say. This, for instance, is English, specifically West Saxon, although there is also a Northumbrian version:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes weard,
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.
And, this is also English. As a matter of fact, it's the same poem:
Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,
the might of the Creator, and his thought,
the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.
I would have used a selection from Beowulf, but I thought you might enjoy Caedmon's Hymn more. Now, what were you saying about how languages don't evolve?