[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.