this was a piece entitled
“Can Chimpanzees Talk?”
in the science and technol-
ogy
supplement
of
Cumhuriyet
newspaper, 25
January, 2003. Based on a
news item published on
BBC’s online site, this arti-
cle claimed that a chim-
panzee called Kanzi had
been taught to speak.
However, the vocaliza-
tions that the chimpanzee
supposedly uttered had
nothing to do with the
skill of “speaking.”
Jared Taglialatela and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, two evolutionist
researchers, claimed that Kanzi produced different vocalizations in
response to certain behavior and objects, and that although the
chimp used these vocalizations—meaning “banana,” “grapes,”
“fruit juice” and “yes”—in different contexts, he did not substitute
the word “yes” under any circumstances. These same researchers
claimed that the chimpanzee had learned to do this by himself.
The fact is that chimpanzees cannot speak. A human’s ability to
speak is not based on making sounds; it comprises exceptional char-
acteristics such as naming concepts and forming grammatically cor-
rect sentences, which no animal can master and whose source no lin-
guist can explain. Evidently, the “words” that Kanzi used repeated-
ly cannot be taken as speech. However, in the same news item, the
critics said that if the vocalizations were to be termed as language,
Birds that Imitate Sound Invalidate
Evolutionary Theory
97
The press claimed that a chimpanzee
named Kanzi had been taught to “speak.”
However, it emerged that the chimpanzee
produced vocalizations that had nothing to
do with the skill of speaking.
