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.
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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I think the hypothesis is: inflection reduces syntax to phonemic pattern matching, which is easier for infants than parsing non-local sentence structure. So it's trading complexity in one dimension for another.
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