Are there simple and complicated languages?
Yes — but probably not in the way most people think. Some languages have been written down for a long time, have lots of literature and poetry to go with them, and have thick grammars too. These languages are “richer” in the sense that they may have a bigger vocabulary and a richer library of cultural links and so on. But they are not more “complicated”. Linguists have found that pretty much all languages, from those spoken by the simplest nomads to the builders of great empires, are all about similarly “complicated”, in the sense that they all have the complex structures necessary to convey human thought and reason. The aboriginal languages of North America, for example, have been found to have massive verb tables that put Latin and Greek to shame. And while languages like English and Chinese don’t have these verb tables, they do have complicated systems of syntax (or sentence structures) that put those North American languages to shame. What about people who say, for example, that “S
