[roenxi]

And with that in mind there is an obvious counterargument to the original "No". If humans learn language through observation and innate knowledge encoded into the brain then we can construct an artificial system that discovers language purely through observation by encoding the same innate knowledge into the system.

Algorithms necessarily contain some knowledge about the data they are working with so that isn't cheating. Neural nets for example have to have some architecture and that predisposes them to learning certain patterns.