When you don't know anything about linguistics: Why are old languages like Latin so much more complex than modern languages like English? Are languages getting simpler over time? Isn't this a problem?
When you know a little about linguistics: All languages are equally complex. While a language may lack complexity in some respects, such as absence of grammatical case, it compensates for this in other areas, such as stricter word order.
When you know a lot about linguistics: The notion that all languages are equally complex, and that apparent lack of complexity in one area of grammar results in a "trade-off" of complexity in another, represents a late-twentieth-century consensus which is increasingly considered outdated and inaccurate. Many scholars have presented counterexamples to the "trade-off" theory, and some scholars have proposed metrics by which the relative complexity of languages can be compared. While some scholars stand by the theory that all languages are equally complex, and debate concerning the validity of various measures of complexity is ongoing, it does indeed seem that some languages can be simpler or more complex than others, whether in whole or with respect to one aspect of grammar. What does remain clear is the foundational principle that **all languages are equally capable of expressing the full range of human thought and experience**, regardless of grammatical complexity relative to any other language.
