It's you who keep changing the terms of the argument to slide out from underneath straightforward rebuttals to your argument. I don't think this commenter did anything to deserve snark.
I also don't think you do your your argument, whatever it may be at this point, any favors by comparing AAVE and Navajo to Klingon.
>I don't think this commenter did anything to deserve snark.
Isn't the parent's question:
"yet your standard on a languages complexity favour of "how many books do those people write""
snark in the first place, as if that's unimportant, and as if literary history is merely a quantity issue? Sorry, but to my European eyes that's not even in question.
And how is the "surprising complexity of the tense system" relevant? Surprising to whom? Racists who thought an african american dialect couldn't be formal enough? Perhaps they haven't heard of creole languages either.
Racist expectations aside, what's "surprising" about its complexity? At best it is more or less comparable to that of English. That's not some "surprising complexity" that can help us access a language, except in the lowest level, of it's internal workings. Of course the main claim of the original article is indeed only that "it's a language too".
Yeah, because literary history and written culture is a trivial matter when speaking about languages.
What's important is if we can find syntactic rules, tenses, etc, in them to classify them as languages.
Because any language, whether Klingon or French, is the same thing, a language, and we don't need anything more when we have that tautology...