Which is the most complex language (dead language and artificial language included)?

Natural: they're mostly the same.
Artificial: take a look at Ithkuil.

medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3

Ithkuil
>the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

Spanish may not be wordly, but it can conjugate the verbs all the way to the moon and back.

You have conjugations for things tha occur, things that occured, things that will occur, things that would occur, things that will begin to occur, things that began ocurring but haven't stopped, things that began occuring and stopped, things that would have occured, things that would occur, things that have been occurring recently, things that will occur and then stop, and then you can specify wether those things happen to you, are done by you, and all the other pronouns you can think of.

Huh, I repeated myself twice there. Still, spanish verbs are flexible.

Oh, and you can make a verb out of a sustantive, and an adjective out of a verb, although results can vary.

Russian, most like, or classical Latin

The reason for this is that Spanish and Italian have relatively few contractions, and express in multiple words what is expressed in English as a single word. For example, "user's dog" stretches out into "Il cane di user"

The question doesn't have a simple, straightforward answer, for the same reason: we do not have an objective measure of linguistic complexity.

In turn, this means that different areas of complexity are not commesurate. What language is more complex? One that has very exotic sounds? Agglutinative morphology? Polysynthetic syntax? Vocabulary that not cognate to other languages? How can we compare these different areas of complexity?
In terms of foreign language learning, different learners may find different areas of language easier or harder to learn. Language learning is very personal. But the overall answer to this question is elusive.
However, the general sense is that there are no languages that are much simpler, more primitive than others. And most certainly “linguistic sophistication” does not correlate with technological sophistication. It is simply not true that languages of technologically advanced peoples are more complex than those of technologically primitive peoples. Quite the opposite is often true: standardized languages of large empires are simpler because they are learned by masses of second language learners and because writing and standardization keep them from changing too quickly.

It occurs to me that a measure of complexity could be the number of words a language has, the number of rules and the number of exceptions.

Basically, how large a file would you need to store the language, and biggest file wins.

Ithkuil is the most complex language ever created by man, but it's "artificial".

I'd say Finnish or Hungarian.

The only thing that could make german more complex than english is the case system, english has more tenses than german and word placement probably makes it even less complex

Before naming language x the most complex because it has a lot of noun cases or verb conjugations or whatever, remember that languages have their complexity in different places--something that's obvious and simple to you may be complex to someone who speaks a language with a lot of noun cases.

Entropy or compressibility is a good measure for this. On pic related you can see the compressed and uncompressed lengths of the Bible in different languages. In short, Chinese wins. The original size is less than half of English. After compression, when only the useful information remains they're roughly the same size. (Disregard Japanese because the translation is problematic, contains editor's notes and other extraneous material).
Source: irif.fr/~dxiao/docs/entropy.pdf

Results for more languages with another approach from arxiv.org/abs/1606.06996

Now let's see the measurements for Bibles written in IPA. Chinese orthography is obviously quite compact.

Isn't that more related to writing? (i.e. not language) If we were to make an analysis with Japanese written in Hepburn, Kunreisiki, Nipponsiki and full hiragana, we would have different results even though lanuage-wise they are the same

Every Chinese character is one syllable (+tone), so the results won't be significantly different. Chinese and Japanese are full of homophones, though. They rely on the fact that humans can deal with ambiguity exploiting context.

Japanese (and maybe Chinese too, I think, I don't speak that language) is also using context to achieve brevity in other ways, like omitting personal pronouns (I, yo, etc.).

>Chinese and Japanese are full of homophones, though. They rely on the fact that humans can deal with ambiguity exploiting context.
Chinese and Japanese do not have more homophones compared to other languages, that is an Anglo myth, they have other ways to discriminate words that have the same phonemes (tones in Chinese and pitch-accent in Japanese), just like how stress isused in languages like Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, etc.

I find Japanese pitch accent use pretty insignificant, but I agree about the Chinese tones. However, I would compare that to the stress in English, or Russian, because in these languages it's very unpredictable, so you have to learn it as part of the word, unlike in Spanish or Italian, where it's very regular, predictable and therefore mostly redundant (ie. it would compress well).

>I find Japanese pitch accent use pretty insignificant, but I agree about the Chinese tones
Yes, Japanese pitch accents have little function in homophone distinction (opposite to Chinese where tone plays a crucial role) because they are part of suprasegmental phonology in Japanese (just like stress in other languages).

>According to scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84930561923&origin=inward&txGid=898ab8b762543bb52215f13f13a213e, about 13.57% of Japanese homophones are distinguished by pitch accent while this number is 71% in Chinese for tone, and 0.000047% for English

Stress in english less predictable than in spanish?

Explain please

i can back this up; spanish is loquacious as fuck
t. spanishfag

do you not speak spanish?
the stress pattern in spanish is always on the syllable containing the last consonant of the root of the word in question, unless it is conjugated or one of the few irregular cases
it is incredibly consistent, whereas stress in English is a complete clusterfuck depending on whether the word's etymology is greek, french, latin-non-french, german, norse, etc. and even then sometimes the etymology doesn't determine the stress or pronunciation
t. spanishfag

Why are you equating complexity with morphological marking? Morphological marking is just one way languages mark grammatical roles. They can also use separate function words, word order, etc. Did you know there's an alternative to the familiar nominative-accusative case marking system familiar to European languages? Ergative-absolutive languages mark the object of a transitive verb the same as the subject of an intransitive verb (in nominative-accusative, the subject of a transitive verb is marked the same as the subject of an intransitive verb). If English were ergative, "jumped him" would mean "he jumped." Or we would say "Bounced the ball" to mean "the ball bounced."

Latin has the same features. German is more complex I bet but maybe not be this dumb definition OP is putting out.

Not exactly. Syllables aren't broken up that way. The word "gente," for instance, is syllabified as "gen.te". According to your proposal the stress should be on the final syllable, because that's the syllable containing the right-most consonant. The standard rule is that the final syllable is stressed, unless the word ends in a vowel, n, or s, in which case the penultimate syllable is stressed.

Oh, I think I get what you mean. It sounds strange to me, seeing that spanish has more cases where words are differentiated by stress (arbitro), but I guess if one includes the rules, then things become far simpler.

English is just a trainwreck, so it does sound logical that it would posess more entropy.

yeah i didn't take into account consonant clusters like "gente"
so i would modify the rule as: stress canonically goes on the syllable containing the first consonant in the last consonant cluster in the root word

honestly it's a lot more apparent if you just listen to a lot of spoken spanish. it's very obvious where the stress goes in almost every single word

t. spanishfag

Thx, Ithkuil - exactly what I was looking for.

Thx, indeed, entropy is an interesting measure.

I didn't know that, thx, very interesting.

Why "dumb"? From wikipedia about Ithkuil:
>The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis would suggest that, Ithkuil being an extremely precise and synthetic language,
>its speakers would have a more discerning, deeper understanding both of everyday situations
>and of broader phenomena, and of abstract philosophical categories.
In other words, If you consider Sapir-Whorf true, which I personally do, speaking Ithkuil would make you more intelligent and wiser ;).

Traditional Chinese
French out of Latin derivitives
Russian is just talking backwards with an S sound in at least every sentence

"Gente" might not have been a good example because there's still a problem when there's not a cluster. You always break the syllables to have the maximal possible onset, so "cosa" is "co.sa". The standard rule they teach second-language learners is that the stress goes on the last syllable unless it ends in a vowel, n, or s, when stress goes on the second-to-last syllable. Maybe you could state the intuition you're going for, relating stress to where the last consonant is, something like: the stress goes on the first vowel to the left of the rightmost consonant that isn't word-final n or s.

>In other words, If you consider Sapir-Whorf true, which I personally do, speaking Ithkuil would make you more intelligent and wiser ;).
please be bait

>In other words, If you consider Sapir-Whorf true, which I personally do, speaking Ithkuil would make you more intelligent and wiser ;).

You'll enjoy this read
newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners

esolangs.org/wiki/Ook!

This is the kind of thread Veeky Forums needs more of.

Some languages can express social structure much better than others. Asian ones more so than western ones, I guess.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_speech_levels
This is a pretty big deal in expressiveness; pretty much all spoken languages can be used to describe physical and abstract things, but conveying a certain tone at the same time might not be possible.

ithkuil.net/00_intro.html
Maybe Ithkuil, a constructed language, it's basically a philosophical language that packs a lot of meaning into itself and enables the user to shift how specific they want to be and how general, a lot of languages can be a bit restrictive when trying to speak of things in more formal terms or in a mode of thought that the language doesn't culturally support. Ithkuil typically gets around this. It also has its own writing system that more adequately accommodates the language.

It is hard to claim superior complexity because languages are not the same, you can easily look from a view-point that doesn't favour certain kinds of languages when in reality, they're just about even in complexity. Even languages that lack certain concepts can often still use those concepts implicitly, sometimes in even more fluid and complex ways.

No.
Many languages can literally have infinite words because words can be constructed from smaller parts. We get an inkling into English, in that we can pretty much apply "able" or "un" to anything. A language might have smaller signage to represent a word but more words overall, still resulting in less space. But even then, more words doesn't really mean more complex.

I heard that latin and/or ancient greek have kind of a "logical" or "constructed" way of exposing concepts,but i don't know if there is any scientific evidence of that.Is it worth to learn one of them?

Why not just learn that Ithkuil language everyone is gabbing about in here?

I looked at it but the language looks completely dead,with greek or latin you can at least read a lot of old books.

Thx

Haha yes I know Ook,...and Brainfuck.

Sarcasm?

Yes, I heard of a theory which states, that one important reason for the superiority of the Ancient Greek culture and their famous philosophers was their language (and its "complexity").
Likewise for the Acient Hindu culture their famous philosophers, with sanskrit.
The author claimed that, opposed to our believe that due to evolution our languages are getting "better", they get worse.

I think it would be worth, learning greek and latin, especially for a person interested in science. Isn´t the math/science language basically still greek/latin?: "limit", "homomorphism", "theorem", "calculus", "mathematics" ;), "analysis"...
But now I have to give Ithkuil a try.

uh oh, then who created the "natural" languaged

Nobody created them.

All languages have more or less the same grammatical complexity, they just differ in how or what they encode. Even Old Chinese which has no morphology whatsoever has a surprisingly deep and intricate grammar.

You pleb, you missed his point. Every language is artificial, even math. The patterns are natural in physics for example, but they are modeled by the human mind in an artificial language.

They're not artificial in the sense that they were created by humans. No human created any natural language, they just naturally came about over time as humans evolved.