"that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity."
I would love to see a citation for this.
It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn.
With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them have equal concept count - I would think it would follow a normal distribution of some sort and that there are outliers at both ends.
This is something I happen to know a bit about, since a while ago I had a long conversation about this on a conlanging forum [0]. Unfortunately, I can give you no citation for this — quite the reverse! In fact, the general consensus seems to be that languages are not at all equally complex. My understanding is that statements to that effect are usually considered to be effectively a ‘lie-to-children’: not wrong as such, but certainly over-simplified. As Mark Rosenfelder says so eloquently in the linked thread:
> [Saying that this statement is wrong] … seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand why Linguistics 101 books say things like this. … It's because non-linguists are obsessed with which languages are better than others, and complexity is part of that. They want to hear that French is more logical, Italian is more beautiful, Arabic is God's language, Phrygian is the first language, etc, etc. They want to hear that the standard languages are better than dialects. They want to hear that primitive cultures speak primitive languages … linguistics professors all run into it and get tired of it and throw in some stuff to combat the myths.
Also, some linguists have put forward examples of genuinely simpler languages. Most famously, David Gil has suggested that Riau Indonesian is fundamentally simpler than other languages [1], but I’m sure there’s other examples.
That being said, I have a dissenting opinion: I think the vast majority of languages are indeed at about the same level of complexity (with exceptional cases like Riau Indonesian and creoles). Again, you can find some intensive discussion of my claim in the linked thread, but basically, my claim is that a lack of sophistication in one part of the grammar tends to be balanced by increased complexity in another part. e.g. Turkish has lots of suffixes making its verbs very complicated; English doesn’t have this, but compensates by using lots of auxiliary verbs with intricate rules for ordering and combining. Kalam only has about 200 verbs in total, but compensates with detailed rules for combining those verbs to give different shades of meaning. And so on and so forth.
I would love to see a citation for this.
It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn.
With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them have equal concept count - I would think it would follow a normal distribution of some sort and that there are outliers at both ends.