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Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of English, German, Scandinavian etc.) was hardly ever written, but its reconstructed grammar is quite complex. Similarly co
by wozer 18y ago
Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of English, German, Scandinavian etc.) was hardly ever written, but its reconstructed grammar is quite complex. Similarly complex as today's Icelandic.
Now I don't know much about this reconstruction process and how error-prone it is. But it's the best we can do for non-written languages of the past.
I don't know anything about the complexity of contemporary non-written languages.
- markessien 18y agoThe reconstruction is as likely to be flawed as not - we cannot base an opinion of a result that we are not sure is accurate at all. Particularly when there are lots of modern day samples we can use as our comparison basis.
- jdminhbg 18y agoWriting is much more widespread in modern Spanish than classical Latin, is modern Spanish grammar more complex?
- markessien 18y agoWriting was more widespread in classical Latin than in modern Spanish. Classical Latin, the type that we read today, was a high brow language, used by educated people. The normal people used Vulgar Latin.