Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: sci.lang FAQ
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Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 17:50:00 GMT
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maury.merkin@his.com (Maury Merkin) writes:


>I don't know how in the world one would develop a "complexity index" to 
>compare two languages, but I doubt you're on the right track.  Personally,

Why would it be so difficult. We already have a field called complexity.
You'd need to distinguish between space and time complexity. 

Total complexity would be a product of the two each raised to some
power and then like in many engineering fields (such as fluid mechanics)
you'd have to fiddle with some parameters.


And yes, I do believe some languages are more complex than others. So that
if people became bilingual the bilingual people would probably start to
use the most expressive and least complex structures of both languages
and that given enough time a new language combining the best features of
both would emerge. At the same time, most words from both languages would
probably survive, some of them with a slight change of meaning so that
the new language would get richer. The new language would probably get
richer in phonology also. In addition you might have more words in the
new language that mean different things because of the collapse of two
similar sounding words from the parent languages. 


--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
