Language complexity

History

Throughout the 19th century, differential complexity was taken for granted. The classical languages Latin and Greek, as well as Sanskrit, were considered to possess qualities which could be achieved by the rising European national languages only through an elaboration that would give them the necessary structural and lexical complexity that would meet the requirements of an advanced civilization. At the same time, languages described as 'primitive' were naturally considered to reflect the simplicity of their speakers. On the other hand, Friedrich Schlegel noted that some nations "which appear to be at the very lowest grade of intellectual culture", such as Basque, Sámi and some native American languages, possess a striking degree of elaborateness.

Darwin considered the apparent complexity of many non-Western languages as problematic for evolution theory which in his time held that less advanced people should have less complex languages. Darwin's suggestion was that simplicity and irregularities were the result of extensive language contact while "the extremely complex and regular construction of many barbarous languages" should be seen as an utmost perfection of the one and same evolutionary process.

Equal complexity hypothesis

During the 20th century, linguists and anthropologists adopted a standpoint that would reject any nationalist ideas about superiority of the languages of establishment. The first known quote that puts forward the idea that all languages are equally complex comes from Rulon S. Wells III, 1954, who attributes it to Charles F. Hockett. Within a year, the same idea found its way to Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"All languages of today are equally complex(.) -- There are no 'primitive' languages, but all languages seem to be equally old and equally developed."

While laymen never ceased to consider certain languages as simple and others as complex, such a view was erased from official contexts. For instance, the 1971 edition of Guinness Book of World Records featured Saramaccan, a creole language, as "the world's least complex language". According to linguists, this claim was "not founded on any serious evidence", and it was removed from later editions. Apparent complexity differences in certain areas were explained with a balancing force by which the simplicity in one area would be compensated with the complexity of another; e.g. David Crystal, 1987:

"All languages have a complex grammar: there may be relative simplicity in one respect (e.g., no word-endings), but there seems always to be relative complexity in another (e.g., word-position)".

In 2001 the compensation hypothesis was eventually refuted by the African-American creolist John McWhorter who pointed out the absurdity of the idea that, as languages change, each would have to include a mechanism that calibrates it according to the complexity of all the other 6,000 or so languages around the world; but linguistics has no knowledge of any such a mechanism.

Revisiting the idea of differential complexity, McWhorter argued that it is indeed creole languages, such as Saramaccan, that are structurally "much simpler than all but very few older languages". In McWhorter's notion this is not problematic in terms of the equality of creole languages because simpler structures convey logical meanings in the most straightforward manner, while increased language complexity is largely a question of features which may not add much to the functionality, or improve usefulness, of the language. Examples of such features are inalienable possessive marking, switch-reference marking, syntactic asymmetries between matrix and subordinate clauses, grammatical gender, and other secondary features which are most typically absent in creoles.

During the years following McWhorter's article, several books and dozens of articles were published on the topic. As to date, there have been research projects on language complexity, and several workshops for researchers have been organised by various universities.

Complexity metrics

At a general level, language complexity can be characterized as the number and variety of elements, and the elaborateness of their interrelational structure. This general characterisation can be broken down into sub-areas:

Measuring complexity is considered difficult, and the comparison of whole natural languages as a daunting task. On a more detailed level, it is possible to demonstrate that some structures are more complex than others. Phonology and morphology are areas where such comparisons have traditionally been made. For instance, linguistics has tools for the assessment of the phonological system of any given language. As for the study of syntactic complexity, grammatical rules have been proposed as a basis, but generative frameworks, such as Minimalist Program and Simpler Syntax, have been less successful in defining complexity and its predictions than non-formal ways of description.

Many researchers suggest that several different concepts may be needed when approaching complexity: entropy, size, description length, effective complexity, information, connectivity, irreducibility, low probability, syntactic depth etc. Research suggests that while methodological choices affect the results, even rather crude analytic tools may provide a feasible starting point for measuring grammatical complexity.

A comparison

Guy (1994) illustrates the point by comparing two Santo languages he has worked on that are about as closely related as French and Spanish, Tolomako and Sakao, both spoken in the village of Port Olry, Vanuatu. Because these languages are very similar to each other, and equally distant from English, he holds that neither is inherently biased as being seen as more easy or difficult by an English speaker (see difficulty of learning languages).

Phonology

Sakao has more, and more difficult, vowel distinctions than Tolomako:

In addition, it has more and more difficult consonant distinctions:

Tolomako has a simple syllable structure, maximally consonant–vowel–vowel. It is not clear if Sakao even has syllables; that is, whether trying to divide Sakao words into meaningful syllables is even possible.

Morphology

With inalienably possessed nouns, Tolomako inflections are consistently regular, whereas Sakao is full of irregular nouns:

Here Tolomako "mouth" is invariably tsiɣo- and "hair" invariably βulu-, whereas Sakao "mouth" is variably œsɨŋœ-, ɔsɨŋɔ-, œsœŋ- and "hair" variably uly-, ulœ-, nøl-.

Syntax

With deixis, Tolomako has three degrees (here/this, there/that, yonder/yon), whereas Sakao has seven.

Tolomako has a preposition to distinguish the object of a verb from an instrument; indeed, a single preposition, ne, is used for all relationships of space and time. Sakao, on the other hand, treats both as objects of the verb, with a transitive suffix -ɨn that shows the verb has two objects, but letting context disambiguate which is which:

The Sakao strategy involves polysynthetic syntax, as opposed to the isolating syntax of Tolomako:

Here aða "the bow" is the instrumental of sɔn "to shoot", and ɛðɛ "the sea" is the direct object of hoβ "to follow", which because they are combined into a single verb, are marked as ditransitive with the suffix -ɨn. Because sɔn "to shoot" has the incorporated object nɛs "fish", the first consonant geminates for ssɔn; ssɔn-nɛs, being part of one word, then reduces to ssɔnɛs. And indeed, the previous example of killing a pig could be put more succinctly, but grammatically more complexly, in Sakao by incorporating the object 'pig' into the verb:

Guy asks rhetorically, "Which of the two languages spoken in Port-Olry do you think the Catholic missionaries learnt and used? Could that possibly be because it was easier than the other?"

Language complexity and creoles

It is generally acknowledged that, as young languages, creoles are necessarily simpler than non-creoles. Guy believes this to be untrue; after a comparison with Antillean Creole, he writes, "I assure you that it is far, far more complex than Tolomako!", despite being based on his native language, French.