Human speech is imitative. Hatch some eggs with an incubator. The chicks come out. They immediately begin to chirp, indeed they chirp before ever they break the shell. The mother does not chirp, she clucks. There is no imitation here. It is instinct. So with all the lower animal creation. Left to itself the roar of the lion, the trill of the nightingale, the squeak of the mouse, in short, all the noises of the lower animal creation are instinctive, not imitative.
But take a human baby, isolate it from human society, and it has no speech. Human speech is imitative, not instinctive. An English baby in English surroundings never learns the French language. Whence then did human speech originate? Apes have no speech to this day.
Take the English language. We are familiar with the origin of the words comprising it—the roots of our words come from Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Latin, Greek, French, Dutch, German, Scandinavian etc., etc. But where did language originate from? We cannot tell. Who taught the first man to speak? If the beast could not give him even the crudest beginnings of speech not even the anthropoid ape, where did the first man get his language? To deny an all-wise Creator, who gave man language, is to impale yourself on the horns of a dilemma without the hope of escape.
If the anthropoid ape could be taught to imitate human speech, even to the small extent a parrot can be taught, how jubilant would the evolutionists be! The parrot's acquirements are purely imitative, but they carry no real thought, nor does the parrot transmit its acquirements to its offspring. Apart from man's training the parrot would be limited to its scream. Let man cease his training and not a parrot will speak.
Language is a truly wonderful thing. Compare a parrot's scream or an anthropoid ape's grunt with the glowing periods of a Demosthenes, a Cicero, a Gladstone, a Spurgeon, and you will find a gulf between the two which cannot be bridged.