I just happen to be cramming for my English 3001 midterm tomorrow so I'll give this a go. So firstly. Syntactically speaking, languages generally have become m

I just happen to be cramming for my English 3001 midterm tomorrow so I'll give this a go. So firstly. Syntactically speaking, languages generally have become more complex over time. When it comes to sound change (phonology) though, things are getting simpler. This is due to external (language interaction) and internal change. Internally, we tend to ease articulation over time, we tend to evolve words to increase perceptual clarity and we tend to introduce sound systems with symmetry. By symmetry I mean, for example, sounds which activate your larynx (AKA "voiced" as in "b" in "boy") naturally create room for an unvoiced pairing like "p" in "pair". Or a vowel sound from the lower back of your mouth like "a" in "father" will incentivize a lower front sound like "a" in "sat". A high back sound like "oo" in "pool" will lead the way for use of a high front sound like "ea" in "seat". Lots of internal as well as external processes at play which tend to evolve things towards a more efficient and simple phonological system. On a more complicated level we have the interaction between morphological (word formation) and syntactic (word arrangement) components. According to my notes the motivating force behind morphological change (and to a lesser extent, syntactic change) is analogy. Not analogy as in the common definition; but analogy as in the process in which one form becomes like another form with which it's associated. For example, "kine" has been replaced by "cows" so that it better conforms to expected pluralization practices. Think of the mistakes children make saying things like "foots" and consider this an untainted window into our brain's natural grammar system. Analogy here serves to remove irregularities and this might be what has you thinking things are getting less complex. You also might be interested in the evolution of English from a more inflection based language to a more analytic one. Inflection languages create grammatical distinctions with morphological affixes. Like prefixes or suffixes, they are attached to words for things like tense. An analytic language like Modern English has lost a lot of it's inflection and uses word order and function words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions) to indicate grammatical relationships. I've got a 70% right now and the guy beside me has a 95%... so that's the best I can do in this moment. Thanks for forcing my procrastination into productivity.