The simplification or streamlining is not related to medical technical terms, but to grammar, spelling and phonations. the word 'scuds' (missile) became commonplace only recently, with the Iraq war. But the older the language, the more complex, which contradicts the notion language started with grunts and coos. The hebrew OT is a complex work, representing the epitomy of grammar, taking the shortest route wordage, and this can require a math-like deciphering process, overturning past translations after deliberation. There is no past writing thread exemplying such literature, making it a msytery how it emerged.
Do you have any references to a source that lays out this creationist notion that language is becoming less complex? I've been hearing creationists state this claim off-and-on since 1970 but no one has been able to produce the source of the claim. As a former language geek (studied foreign languages for 8 years before switching to computer languages), I find that claim to reflect an incredible amount of ignorance about languages. Which is not really that surprising, considering it's most likely of American popular origin and Americans have a reputation for being staunch monoglots.
Languages change over time. Some parts become simpler, yet other parts become more complex. The need to balance simplifications with greater complexity -- which other parts of the language needing to take up the slack produced by a simplification -- derives from the need to keep the language functional. Whatever happens to the language, our need to communicate ideas clearly remains.
Take case, for example. Case is used to indicate what function a noun or pronoun serves in the sentence. The eight Indo-European cases were nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, locative, and ablative. Case would be expressed by modifying the nouns, usually with different endings but sometimes also with changes in the root; eg, the Greek nominative for "human male" is aner (alpha, nu, eta, rho), but in other cases the root changes to andr-, from which we get "android" and "androgenous". This modification of words to express case is called "inflection" and languages that possess this trait are called "inflected languages".
Some of the simplifications in the case system are due to the combining of cases, or rather absorption of some cases into the others. For example, the vocative very commonly gets absorbed into the nominative and the instrumental into the dative. Another example is how, in English, the vocative had combined with the nominative and all the other cases, except for a few parts of the genitive that became the possessive case, got combined into a generic "objective" case that includes direct objects, indirect objects, and objects of all the prepositions.
Interesting things, those prepositions. Originally, they didn't exist, but rather the cases served to express those ideas. But then as cases combined, prepositions were used to clarify which use of that case was being applied. As a result, the language became more expressive and
more precise. When the locative all by itself would only tell you that the location of something was somehow related to where something else was
and it was up to you, the listener, to interpret what that was supposed to mean, a preposition could tell you that object's location with much greater precision, whether it was on top of, under, beside, near, or inside of the locative object -- eg, "La plume de ma tante est sur le table.", so you know that your aunt's pen is
on top of the table, because of the preposition, "sur".
Another form of simplification is the loss of inflection. French and Spanish have lost it. German has largely lost it except for the genitive case and a few words in other cases (eg, das Land -> dem Lande), but inflection is retained by those linguistical newcomers, the definite and indefinite articles and by the endings applied to associative adjectives. [DISCLAIMER: my knowledge of German is entirely from before their recent language reform]. English was inflected prior to 1066, but then lost inflection when it got converted to a Frenchified German.
One way to compensate for this loss of inflection is to use word order to convey the same information. English word order is rather complex and must be exact in order to communicate the meaning that the speaker intends. Changing word order every so slightly in a key place can completely change the meaning; eg:
"The dog bites the man."
"The man bites the dog."
have two entirely different meanings.
In an inflected language, word order is very simple and mixing it up may make you sound a bit funny to a native speaker, but the meaning will remain unchanged; eg, the same sentences in German:
"Der Hund beit den Mann." ("The dog bites the man.")
"Den Mann beit der Hund." ("The dog bites the man.")
The declension of the definite article keeps the meaning straight. And the second format, placing the direct or indirect object first, is very commonly used to emphasize that part of the sentence: "No, the dog didn't bite the child. It's the
man that he bit."
Another effect of making word order and wording (eg, adding prepositions) as a way of compensating for a simplification of the case system, is that the speaker must be more precise and must pack more information into what he says. One justification for the creationist claim of the devolution of language is to point out how the English translation of a Latin phrase is always so much wordier. What they don't realize is that in Latin it was up to the listener to interpret what the speaker was minimalistically saying, whereas in modern English it's up to the speaker to tell the listener precisely what he's saying, leaving much less of the interpretation up to the listener. It's not that the Latin writer had packed so much more into those few words, but rather that the English is far more expressive and exacting.
The claim that "evolutionists" should expect earlier languages and "more primitive" languages to be less complex almost sounds like another very bizaare creationist claim that I've only come across a couple times -- once in a local creationist organization's newsletter and again on the Answers in Genesis site. This claim is that "evolutionists" would expect the historical ancients (eg, the Egyptians) to be of low intelligence, little more than ape-men, and yet they were very ingenious builders and mathematicians.
That claim is, of course, absurd, since it claims "evolutionists" to believe something that anyone who have given the matter any thought at all would not believe. The last "ape-man" was around one million to two millions years ago, depending on whether we would confer that title on Homo Erectus. The ancient Egyptians were modern humans with the same inherent capacity for intelligence as we have.
By the same token, human language had about a million years post-Homo Erectus to develop. All that we have seen of language is only a few thousands of years of its million-year history, a mere 0.4% of the time that it has had to develop.
, along with present-day humans, It almost sound
lol I thought not)
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