[Piotr]:
<<I don't believe languages spoken 10000 or even 20000 yrs ago were very
different from those spoken today in terms of grammatical and phonological
complexity (they probably had somewhat smaller vocabularies for purely cultural
reasons).>>
[Alexander]:
I have the same view in general but ...
[Piotr]:
<<At any rate no gradient of growing complexity has been detected in the
documented history of human language.>>
Can't a tendency of progressive complication of the verb grammar (number of
tenses, moods, modalities) and parallel simplification of the noun (number of
cases) be retraced? Maybe the general complexity is approximately the same but
its structure changes systematically?
Alexander