Why are ancient languages so much more complex than those of today? Wouldn’t it make sense that languages started out simple and then got more complex as necessary?
I don’t think ancient languages are any more or less complex, just different. (Also, I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “ancient.”)
If you read something written in English a few hundred years ago, say, something like Shakespeare, it sounds a bit alien, but it’s perfectly normal for the people reading it at the time. Imagine what a time he would have reading Virginia Wolf, for instance.
Perhaps you could clarify exactly what you mean by “ancient” and “more complex.”
I ment really Indoeuropean, Greek, Latin, etc. Indoeuropean had 8 cases and 3 genders with virtually no set syntax. This simplified into Latin’s 6 (nom, voc, gen, dat, acc, abl). Latin was then simplified into the Romance languages of today, only two genders, neither cases nor declensions, etc. The same thing happened with English and is happening with German. I just don’t understand why this isn’t happening the other way around with languages starting out simple and limited and then developing into more complex bodies as needed.
I’m not at all sure that they are. I certainly did not find Classical Latin or Koine Greek to be “more complex” the Spanish or English. My classmates studying French, Italian, and, especially, German and Polish had similar experiences.
There is an element of language development in which simplifying occurs, but it usually happens when a language is under some sort of outside pressure (such as including a large number of non-native speakers in a brief period).
Often when a language appears to become simpler, it actually moves the complex aspects from one part of speech to another.
New* languages (such as the creole Papiamentospoken on the Netherlands Antilles) are extremely simple compared to predecessor languages, because they tend to inherit only the vocabulary of the older languages and the grammar is quite simple as it develops.
OK. You are using the numbers of cases and genders as your guide. I’m not sure that that is valid. Modern languages certainly have as many declensions as older languages. (We do not always have as many inflections, but that means we need more rules to cover than way in which we express the same ideas.) Since Indo-European is a reconstructed language, I have often wondered how many cases it truly had, as opposed to how many cases we have “reconstructed” because we do not have the actual language before us to examine.
Perhaps it’s because people are just getting lazier. 
D&R
To repeat a thought I just posted in another thread: if you don’t have affixes (prefixes and suffixes) to indicate a word’s grammatical function, you have to lean more heavily on word order. Latin was looser with word order than English, but the cost of that was learning all those case endings and conjugations. So, in terms of complexity, there really isn’t any difference.
It seems that most languages are more or less equally complex, which can be concluded from the fact that all children everywhere in the world learn their languages at about the same age, other things being equal. This is true
for a Lithuanian toddler, who has to learn a half dozen or so cases, grammatical gender, and I don’t know how many conjugations and tenses, as it is for an American or English
tot who has only to contend with our famously “simple” language. But is it really? Syntax may seem to be second nature to us, but if your language doesn’t use word order at all to indicate the parts of speech, then word-order would seem ‘foreign’ and difficult to you. Or take the heavy use of “to be” as an auxiliary verb in English. Most English verbs have only one inflection, -s, in the present tense, yet in most cases we use to do or to be with
the main verb of the statement. In the case of to be , since that verb still does retain some conjugal irregularity, it’s like a case of complexity re-emerging in spite of the fact that the main verb’s congugation has becom e so simple. Moreover, knowing which auxiliary verb to use when might well make English seem difficult to a foreigner. The three statements
[ul]
[li]I go to the store []I’m going to the store []I do go to the store[/ul][/li]all mean more or less the same thing, but each version has a different spin which native speakers recognize without even thinking about it.
How hard a language is to learn depends on how similar it is to languages you already know. You probably did not learn how to speak Ancient Proto-Indoeuropean before you learned English and this biases your experience. Cases, declensions, verb tenses are small potatoes compared with intonations. If the same monosyllable, as in Mandarin, can be pronounced 9 different ways (e.g. “ma”) with nine different meanings, this seems very hard to me as I do not speak a similar Asian language. No doubt vocabularies are getting a lot bigger; how much of a language do you need to know to get by?
There are actually only 5 tones in Chinese, not 9. There are however, dozens of homophones for most syllables that differ only in the written form-- the words are pronounced identically, and you depend heavily on context.
According to my basic linguistics class, no language is ‘simpler’ or ‘more complex’ than any other; these kind of value judgements are no valid comments to make from a linguistic standpoint.
Amazingly, both facts in that post were taught to me by the same person. (Zhang Laoshi: Born in China, PhD in linguistics.)
–John
I’d like to put in my vote to agree with those who have said it’s a case of different, not simpler.
A concept occurred to me last year which may or may not be useful to anyone but me. Consider the space of all expressible human thoughts.
Now imagine a set of basis vectors for that space. That basis is a language.
Sigh. Only a nerd would try to simplify linguistics through an analogy with vector calculus.
Unfortunately, that basis doesn’t span the entire space 
Arjuna34
But Cogito does have a point, or at least part of one: many languages do become morphologically simpler over time—that is, they change a complex system of conjugations and/or declensions to a simpler one. Hare and Elman discuss some aspects of this process in English verb inflection from Old English to the modern language:
At least part of their answer seems to be that the less frequent morphological forms tend to get assimilated to the more frequent forms, because people tend to learn the more common forms more thoroughly and apply them indiscriminately (we’ve all heard young children say “I gived” or “I eated” or something like that, automatically (and incorrectly) applying the more common regular “-d” past tense marking to a verb that’s actually irregular. But children don’t say “we lave there” for “we lived there” on the analogy with “gave” instead of “gived”—that is, they seldom or never substitute the less common irregular construction for the regular one).
So yes, there appear to be certain patterns of simplification in many (not all!) languages, and cognitive reasons why those patterns occur. But as Tom pointed out, *Often when a language appears to become simpler, it actually moves the complex aspects from one part of speech to another. * Languages often become syntactically more complex, for example, as they get simpler in other ways. (I always like Michael Coulson’s example of comparing the sentences “An unexpected arrival will admittedly affect our numbers” and “It’s true that how many we’re going to be depends on whether anyone turns up that we aren’t expecting.” They both mean about the same thing, and the second form sounds more colloquial and easy to understand, but in fact it is much more syntactically complex than the first!)
As for why languages didn’t “start out simple” and then get more complex: well, for all we know, they did. Latin and Sanskrit and even Proto-IndoEuropean are a heck of a long way from the origin of language, after all! The earliest languages that we still have textual or oral evidence of, or can now reconstruct from their daughter languages, are already very mature. You’re not really going to find any evidence for language rules at a stage like “Gog want meat. Theena make fire. Ugh, ugh”, AFAIK. 