> How come every recorded or reconstructed earlier version of every language spoken today is more complex than the contemporary version? This is a) not true, b

> How come every recorded or reconstructed earlier version of every language spoken today is more complex than the contemporary version? This is a) not true, b) the transition to writing has a large effect on the language, not the contact with the western world, and c) I suspect you meant "analytic"/"syntactic" rather than "simple"/"complex". Neither is strictly more complex than the other, although syntactic languages typically require memorizing more forms. A few notes. First, analytic languages seem simpler but require just as much understanding of how the words interact; this learning is not typically reflected in terms of memorization. Second, there is no obvious complexity gradient at ALL—even in languages that appear to drop "features", it's typically because of absorption and/or emergence of other features. For example, look at english—some parts are very "simple", but the language as a whole is about as complex as it gets and is NOT easy to learn. In contrast, a highly syntactic language (e.g. most early PIE languages—polyphonic greek, sanskrit, classical latin) seems more complex because so much memorization is necessary to use features together, but the lack of irregularities through loan words compensate. In addition, it's far easier to learn complex forms by listening rather than writing. IMHO syntactic languages get a bad rep because of this.