Why are many ancient languages so complicated compared to many modern languages?

Question

Many ancient languages have a structure that is more complex than that of the "respective" modern languages. Modern languages like English have simpler structure, without case, gender or declination, compared to ancient languages spoken in the same area, such as Latin. Reading Latin texts, I wonder if the ordinary Roman really communicated using such complex constructions. Or perhaps everyday language was simpler than the written one?

The same is true for ancient Greek and Sanskrit. So why have these languages become simpler over time? Were the constructions we find in ancient written texts usually used in spoken language?

Answer 1

No language is "more simple" than other languages. Old English had just 2 tenses, present and past, now there are 16 of them, future and future-in-the-past forms developed over the time, the continuous aspect appeared, the perfect appeared, so the verbal system acquired much more forms than it used to have. On the other hand, the nouns lost the gender and cases. It is always like that, if something is lost, some new features appear to compensate the loss.

A good example of a language that gets more and more complicated over the course of time is Chinese. The Old Chinese had no parts of speech, no number, no tense, it was a monosyllabic isolating language. Now Chinese is developing in the direction of getting more complicated, its words are mostly two-syllable now, parts of speech appeared in it, tenses begin to appear, etc.

And some languages can become more simple during some period, and then again get more complicated. Hindi is like that, first it lost all the cases which were in Sanskrit, but later it developed a new system of cases.

Answer 2

Many modern European languages are as complex as Latin, Ancient Greek, or Sanskrit. I'd point out Lithuanian but most Slavic languages are typologically similar to the mentioned ancient ones. And yes, native speakers use all constructions their language provides (all languages change, of course, so there are archaic constructions but it has nothing to the with complexity).

BTW no human language is primitive, English has simpler morphology than Latin but it's more complex elsewhere.

Answer 3

We don't know why Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit had the grammatical systems that they did, or why modern languages related to these have developed different grammatical systems.

It's difficult to measure the overall "complexity" of a language. The other answers give some idea of how people have tried to address this question, but as far as I know there is still no consensus between all linguists about whether we can meaningfully compare the complexity of different attested natural human languages. Some people have argued that all human languages are of similar complexity; other people have argued that some languages such as pidgins and creoles actually are less complicated overall than other languages.

As other people have pointed out, complexity is not only a matter of conjugations and declensions; we can also see complexity in areas like syntax or vocabulary, which might be harder to measure. However, the idea that languages that are simple inflectionally "compensate" by having more complex syntax is as far as I know not particularly well-supported, either theoretically or empirically. (If anyone does know of a compelling argument for this hypothesis, please let me know—I am certainly not an expert.)

As Atamiri pointed out, there are languages spoken in the present day that have systems of inflection that look as complicated, or more so, than the ancient Latin systems of inflection. So it does not seem to be impossible for ordinary people to speak inflectionally complex languages in the present day. This suggests that it is also not impossible that ordinary Latin speakers in the past used without difficulty some of the constructions that seem "complex" to Latin learners today. (We know that there were differences between refined and everyday Latin, but the things in refined Classical Latin that native Latin speakers had trouble with aren't necessarily the same as the things that modern non-native learners of Latin have trouble with.)

There is no obvious universal (by which I mean, worldwide and exceptionless) trend of languages developing simpler inflectional systems, although there might be some kind of non-obvious or non-universal trends along these lines. I don't think we have any strong and well-supported explanations of the possible causes of these possible trends. I think people fairly often point to things like contact between different languages or different varieties of a language, and incomplete acquisition as potential causes of "simplification" in the grammar of a language.

Answer 4

Linguists have abstracted "Protoindogermanic" roots from various ancient languages of the language family. There is no direct evidence for such forms, but even the documented history of languages like ancient Greek shows significant amount of changes of its use, with many changes occuring when Greek was a world language used for communication outside of its native speaker circle (it is actually already a simplification to talk of "Greek" since it is a comparatively diverse collection of island dialects, pronunciations, forms and spellings in ancient times).

The evidence we have of older forms of various Indogermanic languages in ancient times very much suggest that the kind of fixed sentence structure built from an aggregation of clauses is a newer development, with the focus of older language use being on nominal phrasings. Prepositions tended to be optional and/or proper prefixes, with the actual meaning expressed by a much larger case system than the systems used in antique times (antique Latin used ablative and vocative cases regularly, antique Greek had vocative and remains of a locative), typically expressed by suffixes. The case system made it convenient to express meaning not through a verb structure but nominal phrases.

When verbs gained increasing mind share, they got their own share of suffixes for tenses, modes, numeri, times, person. Something like "you two should have started to be a little bit ashamed of yourself" could be expressed in a single word.

Creating utterances as a collection of heavily flected words with little requirement as to order and structure later became more rigid and sentence order and particles like prepositions became much more a part of speech that was considered correct than it were at some point of time.

As opposed to more "archaic" living language like German, English relies very little on flectation and on rather few word suffixes while depending much more on sentence order which is much more flexible in German than in English since English uses it as the main factor conveying the relation of items in a sentence.

So basically the "complex" grammar of ancient languages evolved from a state where single words were extensively modified and aggregated in order to convey complex meanings instead of synthesizing sentences with prescribed structure. The common unit of an utterance became a sentence rather than a noun or nominal phrase.

So the languages you consider complex compared to English started out simple in a different way and evolved into more complexity by adding verbs, sentence structure, prepositions and other stuff. Making much of that mandatory provided redundancy that English took opportunity of to simplify the language again eventually, throwing out the case system and other details (with the exception of their ingrained impact on some core stuff like some verb forms and pronouns).

Answer 5

In some cases, it seems that when a country is subject to different dominations, there is a sort of simplification of the language's morphology. The domination in most of the case force to use a more simplified language that allows communication between invaders and natives. I found this TED video of John McWhorter regarding the influence of Viking domination on the English language very interesting. Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit were languages belonged to strong "nations" and their inflexion was complicated until these nations could defend them from invaders influence.

Answer 6

First of all, English is not a single language; it is a polyglot of French, Latin, Old English and other stuff from the British Isles. The original primitive English was much more regular in grammatical constructions. For example, originally the English said "I have" (first person) and "Thou hast" (second person). This grammatical structure gradually disappeared as English became a conglomeration of other languages. This same pattern is true of other polyglots. For example, Singlish, the polyglot spoken in Singapore, has very little grammar. Instead, like in English, function words are used to perform grammatical needs.

Also, languages appear to just degrade over time. For example, Greek is slightly less structured than it was in ancient times. It is not exactly clear why this has happened, but one possibility is just the wear and tear of the ages. Greek was under the control of conquerors like the Romans and Turks for hundreds of years. During those times, the Greek language went relatively untended, like a garden growing weeds.

Secondly, Latin is an outlier. It is possibly the most formal and structured language known and having had a wide use. The Romans did indeed fully use their language and greatly prided themselves on its proper use. Rhetoric and grammar were considered to be the most important parts of a young person's education. By the Lex Cincia it was actually illegal for people accused of crimes to hire a lawyer--they were expected to be able to plead their own case, pro se, (although advocates pro bono were allowed). The Romans considered themselves to be superior to everyone around them for three reasons: they shaved, wore the toga and they spoke a sophisticated language, but others had beards, breeches and crude, barbarous tongues. Thus, mastery of language was considered one of the essential elements of what it meant to be a Roman. In Roman plays, the parts of Romans always use proper language and foreigners are depicted using slang and vulgar, ungrammatical speech. The Romans considered proper and exact use of language to be the mark of cultural superiority.

It is interesting to compare Japanese to Latin. Like Latin, Japanese is a highly structured and formal language. However, unlike Latin it is intended to be simple, not sophisticated. The Japanese take pride in this, saying always "Japanese is simple." Of course, to learn it is not, but the constructions are intended to be simple and logical. The reason for this difference from Latin is that in Rome, rhetoric, the art of persuasion and communication was considered critical, but in Japan the reverse was true: people were expected to obey higher ups. Arguing in Japan is considered uncouth. Therefore, Japanese is the language of giving orders and social structure. There are elaborate forms of speech in Japan that carefully identify the social rank and position of the speakers. Latin by contrast is a language of social equality. Thus, you can see a language, including its complexity and sophistication, reflects its governing society like a mirror.