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This is my first question here, and though my native language derives from Latin, I, unlucky, didn't get a change to study much Latin at school. Two questions that have often crossed my mind are:

  1. Is Latin more sophisticated than its predecessor, Proto-Indo-European?
  2. Were all its inflections, conjugations, etc, already present in PIE, or did they develop later?
Adam
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Lingo
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    Latin is really less inflectionally complex than Proto-Indo-European, not more; it has fewer noun cases, a much simpler verbal system, and probably a lot less freedom in word derivation. PIE didn't have as many declension and conjugation classes (which are pretty trivial in Latin anyway), but that's just because the suffixes and stem-final sounds that mixed in with the endings to create them in Latin were still transparent at the time. – Cairnarvon Feb 27 '23 at 15:36
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    It seems to me there are two good questions here but the combination is making it seem muddled: (1) How do inflections and other 'sophisticated' properties arise in a language when precursors didn't have them? (2) How did Latin emerge from its precursor languages? – dbmag9 Feb 27 '23 at 16:39
  • @dbmag9 I agree, but I'm not a frequent enough contributor here to feel comfortable enough to separate them into 2 questions. Would the OP or someone else like to give it a try? – End Anti-Semitic Hate Feb 27 '23 at 21:26
  • As the first question doesn't fit on this site, the easiest solution is to just remove it and leave this question asking about the origin of Latin. – OrangeDog Feb 28 '23 at 10:12
  • But then both parts are also based on a false premise, so not really answerable as written anyway. – OrangeDog Feb 28 '23 at 10:13
  • @0rangeDog - if the question is unanswerable, you mean the answer given is wrong ? – Ambush Feb 28 '23 at 12:20
  • I made some edits and format changes so the first question is less of a statement and more of a pure question. – Adam Feb 28 '23 at 14:14
  • We could still split this into two separate questions, although I think the second question is just a more detailed way of asking the same as the first. – Adam Feb 28 '23 at 14:17
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    Honestly, I thought, despite the mistaken premise, it was fine as it was. This is clearer, though, if it asks what the op really wanted to ask. I would vote leaving it as it is now. – cmw Feb 28 '23 at 15:37
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    PIE was inflectionally more complex than Latin (as various reconstructions used to explain different inflectional systems in the various IE daughter languages and families attest). But where did the inflections come from originally? One theory (I think) is that PIE evolved from an earlier, isolating language in which function words eventually became dependent on the context in which they were used, and slowly fused with nearby words to become affixes rather than standalone words. – chepner Feb 28 '23 at 16:13
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    (The overall theory, one that is nearly untestable due to the lack of attested protolanguages, is that languages drift back and forth, with inflections disappearing and being replaced with function words and complex grammar, and then back as the function words are reassimilated into inflections. Maybe linguists in 20,000 years or so can confirm or refute this theory of language evolution :) ) – chepner Feb 28 '23 at 16:17
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    @chepner An answer that reiterates those comments, perhaps with an indication of where to read more, would be a valuable contribution and would get my upvote. – dbmag9 Mar 01 '23 at 10:45

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Well, the simple answer is that its predecessors weren't "more basic". Latin has actually lost several noun cases and regularized its verbs significantly from the way Proto-Indo-European worked.

In general, though, naturally-evolved languages are never more "basic" or "sophisticated" than others. It's somewhat of an axiom in linguistics that all languages are equivalent in their expressiveness, and while there's been a lot of debate over what exactly that means, recent work with information theory supports the idea that all languages convey the same amount of information over time. More information here (disclaimer: I wrote this article); the short version is, while English might convey more information per syllable than Japanese, it can't convey as many syllables per second, because losing one of those information-dense syllables to background noise would be much more of a problem. Classical Latin, in particular, appears to convey about as much information per syllable as English does.

Draconis
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    I believe I remember you mentioning this paper in a different answer - thanks for sharing. Fascinating read! – Adam Feb 27 '23 at 18:33
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    Yes, "more efficient" language is inevitably less error-correcting, so more fragile, especially on noisy channels. "Information theory" is a good way to view some of this. :) – paul garrett Feb 27 '23 at 21:43
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    @paulgarrett, On this already Horace said: brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio (I try to be brief, but end up being obscure). – d_e Feb 27 '23 at 22:59
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    All mature languages may be equally expressive, but developing languages such as pidgins aren't. – Mark Feb 28 '23 at 04:06
  • @Mark True. That's partially what I mean with "naturally-evolved", as opposed to languages still developing to full maturity (or conlangs). – Draconis Feb 28 '23 at 04:09
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    @Draconis to that last parenthetical, it'd be interesting to compare the bit rate of Esperanto speech from the earliest recordings we have to modern Nth-generation native speakers (and to see if 1st generation native speakers are different from 2nd or 3rd, and how they all compare to modern non-native fluent Esperantists) – Tristan Feb 28 '23 at 09:30
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    There are some exceptions to this: for descriptions of spatial information, signed languages are faster than spoken ones. (The test I read about had one person with a doll's house and furniture, and another person with a drawing of the house showing the furniture in place. The person with the drawing had to explain to the other where all the furniture went. A sign language can usually indicate position and orientation simultaneously, making it much faster in practice.) – TRiG Mar 01 '23 at 15:25