[simias]

I don't quite understand your comment in relation with the article. The main subject isn't the complexity or simplicity of the language but rather that it's not effectively used by the population at large which makes it a relatively inefficient tool for communication. He mentions that the language "has fewer words than most languages" but that's not his main point.

This text is also clearly not meant as a treatise of linguistics about Bahasa Indonesia, it's more of a cultural trivia piece so I don't think it's really fair to criticize the lack of cold hard linguistic facts. It's also an important piece of information for anybody considering learning the language, as it turns out that it might not be as useful as one might guess even if you plan to live in Indonesia.

I do challenge your assertion that "claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence". It's true that it's very hard to judge the "absolute" difficulty of a language because everybody has very profound cultural and linguistic biases. It's also true that it's not generally a very useful information, I don't know which of Italian or Vietnamese is objectively harder but I know that as a speaker of French and English I'd probably have an easier time learning the former than the latter.

That being said I think if you're familiar enough with the languages you're "rating" you can come up with a pretty decent classification of "absolute" difficulty. For instance I'd personally consider Portuguese to be objectively harder than Spanish, because while they're extremely similar languages Portuguese does have an objectively more complex phonology and slightly trickier grammar. I would also say that French is "absolutely" more difficult than Italian because of the more complex spelling and phonology.

Chinese is widely considered a difficult language, partly because it's tonal (and you could say that's cultural bias) but also because of its very complex writing system. I don't think anybody could say that the differences in difficulty between written Spanish and written Chinese can only be attributed to cultural judgement.

[iafisher]

> For instance I'd PERSONALLY consider Portuguese to be OBJECTIVELY harder than Spanish.

Emphasis mine.

I don't mean to say that some languages aren't more difficult for speakers of a particular language to learn--no doubt French is easier for English speakers to learn than Chinese. A speaker of a different language that is also tonal would likely find Chinese easier to learn, though. What you're really measuring is not complexity but similarity.

You have a good point that some languages may have more difficult writing systems than others. Linguists traditionally don't consider orthography to be part of a language proper, as a language can have multiple writing systems (like Serbo-Croatian) or none at all, but you're right that most people don't make that fine a distinction between language and writing system.

I didn't mean to be overly critical of the article, which I mostly enjoyed, but saying that a language is "simple" or "rigid" carries a lot of cultural and political baggage--think about how Europeans of the colonial period denigrated African languages, or how in the United States, Australia and Canada indigenous children were punished for using their own language.

[foldr]

No-one disputes that some writing systems are more complex than others, but statements like an "objectively more complex phonology" or "slightly trickier grammar" are pretty difficult to cash out in precise terms.

We know that kids learn all of these languages at the same pace, which suggests that the complexity differences between spoken languages are not particularly significant from the point of view of someone who doesn't already speak a language.