jwmurphy...@mindspring.com (Joseph W. Murphy) wrote:

[quoting a book]

Sounds like a typical strawman argument: start arguing against
opponents' alleged claim that the Moon consists of cheese, just because
they have dared to question your theory about the Moon as the face of a
human-like person.

That's an interesting implicit definition of "roughly". But this does
not make any more sense.

So now "complexity" is how difficult it is to a linguist to describe a
language. Who would argue with statements about _such_ complexity?

Let's not hold our breath.

Surely there are _some_ ways in which the complexity of a language can
be defined in an objective and even measurable manner. For example, the
number of cases is a measure, and so is the number of essentially
different meanings that word order can express, and the number of
different phonemes, etc. But it would be worse than futile to study
such issues if the real goal is to declare some languages as more
complex, more advanced, more communicative, etc., than others. Even if
we limit ourselves to mere complexity (and why would _that_ be
interesting, really?), an overall complexity would be just a weighed
sum of individual complexities - and the results would tell more about
the opinions of people who set the weights than anything else.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/