I've heard from my German teacher that Latin and other languages of that time were more "complicated". One can argue that linguists don't operate with such categories as "simple" and "complicated" but you know what I mean. If not - read this post Why is the grammar of old languages so complicated?
Linguists rather speak in terms of "inflectional morphology", "morphological variation", "variation in phonemes"... They even counted these and other language features in each of the languages (2,236 to be precise and 504 in another study) and found out that the older the language - the more "complicated" it is: Babelicious! Bigger languages are also simpler ones and Where on Earth did language begin? And the most complicated language in terms of phonemes variation is !Xu - a language spoken in southern Africa which has 141 phonemes opposed to 44 in English. That correlates with the idea that Homo Sapiens evolved from Africa and confirms what my German teacher said. But
How did ancient languages get complicated in the first place?
Linguists rather speak in terms of "inflectional morphology", "morphological variation", "variation in phonemes"... They even counted these and other language features in each of the languages (2,236 to be precise and 504 in another study) and found out that the older the language - the more "complicated" it is: Babelicious! Bigger languages are also simpler ones and Where on Earth did language begin? And the most complicated language in terms of phonemes variation is !Xu - a language spoken in southern Africa which has 141 phonemes opposed to 44 in English. That correlates with the idea that Homo Sapiens evolved from Africa and confirms what my German teacher said. But
How did ancient languages get complicated in the first place?
