Complex Grammar Has a Simple Solution

Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Now linguist David Gil has proposed a corollary, languages become as complex as time will allow them to be. Speaking to the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Thursday March 13, 2008), he noted that linguists have generally supposed that languages become more complex in order to handle more complicated tasks. However, Gil argues that very simple languages are sufficient to run, say, Indonesia with its two hundred million people.

Gill has designed a very simple type of language, one simpler than anything found in the world today, that he calls “isolating-monocategorical-associational” language, or IMA. Its words have no internal forms, e.g., chicken/chickens or play/played; no categories, e.g. noun versus verb, and no meanings that come from syntax rather than associating a word with something. Although no existing language is as simple as IMA language, and many are much more complicated, he said that some languages are almost as simple, and pointed to Riau Indonesian, spoken in a province near the Malacca Strait, as an example. Despite the simplicity of their language, the people are able to organize societies, sail boats, and maintain relations with the outside world.

For the purposes of this blog, the implication is clear. We can never demonstrate from archaeological data that speakers had a language that was much more complex than a simple IMA language. If IMA language is sufficient to run a civilization, why are most languages so much more complicated? Gil explains the complexity as the result of self-organization that is not adaptive but driven by system-internal forces. In short, much of the complexity that linguists say must be explained before the origin of language can be understood, is secondary and probably had no role to play in the rise of human speech. Certainly, if it did, that role can never be demonstrated as having been required.