Is language actually special?

During the course of my sophomore year, I frequently sat through Organic Chemistry class and wondered if the teacher had accidentally begun to lecture in a different language. For long periods of time, I would not be able to recognize a single word he had said and could not follow along with the lecture. This is a feeling many students may have in a foreign language class when the teacher actually is speaking a different language. While reading Siegler and Alibali's chapter on Language Development, one continually encounters the notion that language acquisiton is "special." For up to a year, babies possess the ability to learn phonemes for any particular language. After this year, they still retain the ability to master other languages with great ease. At this stage of development, children have increased brain plasticity as compared with adults and still have large areas of the brain that are both underdeveloped and undecided in function.
What if Chemistry were considered a language? Yes, the phonemes are generally from the English language, but nonetheless, the conceptual basis for the subject is completely foreign to most individuals. Do children at an early age maintain the ability to obtain all different types of information, or are they limited specifically to language? Most parents do not find it beneficial to read an infant a book on Calculus because they feel it is irrelevant and beyond the child's comprehension. However, they do feel it is beneficial to read a child fairy-tales which are still completely outside the realm of a child's comprehension. Language is taught to children on a daily basis both directly and indirectly. If we were to continually teach our children science from the day they are born their understanding of the subject matter may progress just as well as their grammatical progression occurs. Is language really special or is it simply the most commonly reinforced learning objective? Chile prodigies may be the result of such early exposure to subject matter out of the normal real of what is taught to infants.
The opening paragraph of the book states that language is internally motivated and sites an example, "No one else was in the room during Anthony's monologue. Nonetheless, he found talking sufficiently enjoyable that he spoke anyway (183)." In this passage, language is not used from communication. Language is an amusement to the baby becuase he is able to produce sounds and words although they do not make linear sense. To imply a babies motivation from a strain of words seems somewhat exaggerated to me. The child may take pleasure in the fact that he is learning a language or may be happy to know he can create sounds from within his body regardless of any meaning or communication factor these sounds may entail. If written numbers were to replace words the way sign language often does, would there be the same response? Will children absorb any concept that begins reinforcement at birth or are they truly innately determined to learn language?