Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

Complexity tends to remain constant in languages: as one area of the
language becomes less complex, another will tend to gain in complexity.
I don't have any proof of this, but I know some other people on the list
hold this opinion too. :) However, I'm not sure I agree with you that
french has a more complicated tense system than Latin. In fact, most of
the romance languages have been reducing the complexity of the
tense/aspect/mode system, and I can't think of any that have increased
it. All romance languages to my knowledge have lost some tenses/aspects
in the subjunctive, French and Italian have lost the preterite or simple
past for an compound past which is simpler to form (since the only
irregularity you need to remember is the form of the past participle...
there are not irregular forms for each person). No romance language I
speak still has a simple pluperfect anymore, etc.
  As for Hungarian, Hungarian unlike latin has a much simpler case
system, or so it seems to me, with less irregularities and less
different declensions to memorize etc, to reflect the fact that
Hungarian has an awful lot more cases, and complicating the formation of
those cases too much would make it an amazingly difficult language to
say anything in. I don't think Hungarian cases are much more difficult
than prepositions in other languages, unlike Latin, where there are
irregular case forms all over the place and different declensions etc.
 What do you mean by saying English has 3 cases? I count two, only
marked in the pronoun system: Subject, vs Object/Oblique. I am not sure
that the position rule regarding dative arguments (Ie He sent him it =
He sent it to him") constitutes a separate case, in the sense of case in
Latin or Hungarian. And English having 5 tenses (I take here tense in
the Romance sense of Tense/Aspect/Mode combination)? English has two
simple tenses, Past vs non past, and uses various auxilliaries, modals
etc (sometimes occuring with participles eg I have X) to add extra
Tense/Aspect/Mode information. My point is, I'm not sure how you came up
with 5, because if you are counting simple tenses English has 2, and if
you are counting all the tense/aspect/mode combinations formed with
auxilliaries, English has more than 5.
 I would also point out that Proto-IE is supposed to have had quite a
complicated system of TAM combinations similar to Latin, so saying it
has three "tenses" is either misleading or plain wrong if you are still
using tense to mean TAM combination, as when you talk about French or
Romance "tenses". Hungarian, on the other hand, has only two simple
tenses that I am aware of, Past vs Non-Past.
 I am not arguing with the thrust of your argument, that complexity has
moved from one grammatical system to another, but I thing that a lot of
your information is wrong regarding tenses especially, and it is unclear
to me when you mean tense in its true sense, and when you mean a
tense/aspect/mode combination. I may have misinterpreted you as meaning
one when you meant the other... I'm sorry if I have.

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