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by bloak 2978 days ago
As far as I know, we have no reason to believe that the complexity of languages has changed over the last 200,000 years. The languages spoken by today's stone-age hunter-gatherers (there still are a few) are not systematically and fundamentally different from the languages spoken by more technologically advanced groups.
2 comments
BurningFrog 2978 days ago
Well, I think we have next to no information about language development for 195,000 of those 200,000 years, so we don't a much reason to believe anything.

I'd speculate that since language skills are important, evolution would have worked to increase them over that era.

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bloak 2976 days ago
I don't know much about human evolution and history... However, if language skills evolved after humans left Africa then I'd expect them to have evolved a bit differently in different local populations. Yet innate language skills seem to be the same everywhere. So I would guess that innate language skills haven't changed much in the last 100,000 years. So I would guess that people have been speaking languages like today's languages (in all their glorious variety) for the last 100,000 years.
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contoraria 2978 days ago
> The languages spoken by today's ... are not systematically and fundamentally different ...

That is a meaningless statement, when there is no consensus on the fundamentals of language, and more so because the Languages of the world differ variously.

I'm not sure what you think how complexity of language is measured. Certainly, there are terms and expressions that had to be invented along with the concepts that they describe, which hunter gatherers don't know, and that's not limited to technology. Emotional content would be much more important on a human scale. I think the question would have to be, whether everyone was able to speak. Which term would the analogous to "literate"?

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bloak 2978 days ago
I think we basically agree.

The only way I can think of for measuring the complexity of a language is an inaccurate empirical one: see how hard it is for speakers of unrelated languages to learn it. That approach would probably confirm that Hausa is harder to learn than Bahasa Indonesia, for example, though whether that's what other people mean by "complexity", I can't say.

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