By "complex" I do not mean the hardest language to learn. I mean expressiveness of the language and the complexity of the grammar (for example I consider a language with singular,dual,plural more complex then one with just singular,plural)
Which is the most complex language (dead language and artificial language included)?
Anthony Ward
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Jace Miller
Fortran
Samuel Cox
Lol. Except programming languages or math. A language intended for communication (by humans).
Julian Bennett
>expressiveness
If by that you mean useless unneeded extra words for the sake of verboseness ... I'd say Spanish, maybe Itallian. Look a the word counts and book sizes of translated versions of the same story. Spanish translated books are sometimes twice the pages.
Carson Davis
Thomas Myers
Then I would classify spanish as not very complex (I meant with expressiveness in the following way: More words for the same statement => lower expressiveness (in general)).
Background of the question: I heard about a theory which stated, that Ancient Greek is more complex than todays languages. And he concluded, that this was a reason why the culture and philosophy of Ancient Greek was superior.
Angel Cooper
Then you mean to compare dictionary sizes? Or maybe the most tenses and verb conjugations? Your greek example has to do with cost of writingtoo. When a papyrus scroll or stone tablet were the methods of writing you stopped to think it through and only the upper echelons knew how to read at all.
Jason Gutierrez
thx
> Or maybe the most tenses and verb conjugations?
Yes. Complexity of the underlying grammer.
Brayden Edwards
German maybe comes to mind, 3 different past tenses, 2 different future tenses and every noun has a fucking gender (out of three). Word placement is also not arbitrary.
Russian is also worth checking out. Lots of cases.
Cameron Johnson
How about Lojban? I dont know much about it but I remember reading someone saying it's pretty expressive.