Re: Language and complexity

I agree with all of you and perhaps I should have expressed myself better! I anticipated some of these answers: people are very sensitive to words like "primitive", "complex", "simple". But what other words should we use if we want to discuss growth and development ("inflectionally challenged"?) or if we want to compare the structure of one language with the structure of another?

I know that more inflectional forms doesn't equal "better" or "more civilised". And a large number of inflected forms is just one kind of complexity, there are many other kinds of language complexity as well. As a beginner it is easy to think in those terms, but I believe anyone who is truly interested in languages will sooner or later learn that this is not the case.

To John. You wrote -

Given the complexity of early languages, is there any argument that
languages are becoming grammatically more simple with technological
progress.... Rather than primitive = simple, maybe we have a modern =
simple, with reductions in complexity as culture contact increases
between language groups.

Have you seen an essay by Babaev called Structural Variability of Indo-European Morphology? He shows that the number of inflections must have been very few in the earliest stage of the language, then growing (Sanskrit), then diminishing again (most modern languages). He also reveals that in some IE languages in India the number of inflections is rising again, a fact which was unknown to me. According to him, language development over a long period of time looks like a sinusoid curve. If this is true, there has been time for a lot of peaks and valleys during the tens of thousands of years that humans have been speaking. Sanskrit or Proto-IE may not have been the first peak on that curve.

Hakan