I have a crackpot theory that the PIE flamen/brahmin caste invented the PIE language as an IQ-signaling mechanism, and proliferated inflections to make the priestly language as difficult as possible.
Hmm. I learned Classical Greek. How does that compare with Homeric? I gave up on trying to learn Sanskrit when I realized it was MUCH worse than the Greek I’d learned. My recollection is >4000 verb forms per conjugation, and several of those. Maybe memory exaggerates?
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The general trend moving from Homeric (mix of older dialects in a literary mash) to classical Attic to Hellenistic Koine is that of loss of inflectional morphology, the same as continued over the next millennia. Here's one theory as to why that happens:http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 …
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I guess “complexity makes acquisition easier for infants” doesn’t seem plausible to me (but I’ve read only the abstract…)
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