When I think about most of the revered texts, either religious or philosophical, they seem to be written in complex languages. Sanskrit (e.g. Rig Veda), forms of Chinese (Tao Te Ching), probably Hindi (not sure), and western classics, written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. That is just my impression, but it seems like there is at least some correlation.

It may seem counter-intuitive that complex grammar would help, rather than weigh down thought processes. But consider the engendering of nouns in Spanish and French. Lera Boroditsky, a respected linguist I mentioned earlier, found that the presence of gendered nouns actually helped test subjects make sense of complex sentences. I am not sure how they went about testing that, but I found it quite interesting.

Well, most revered texts were made early in society, thus why they are revered now as they had a sort of establishing role for many modern nations and cultures.

The complexity is pure incidental - sanskrit, latin, chinese, they were all the languages spoken at the time, and all had writing systems which were only just becoming popular - for example, runes used by Northerners were thought to be attributed to magic powers thats how new it was to them.

Of course, writing spread as time went on, so later we see different languages getting their own texts, like Old English, Gothic, Church Slavic, and so forth.

In these early days of writing though, while some systems were brain numbingly easy, other systems were brain numbingly hard (like Chinese), which sometimes added to the idea of these texts being innately complicated, when rather, they just didn't have the time to develop into more user friendly writing systems (and in Chinese's case, it's only just developed into something easier recently in the last millennium in Japan, giving birth to Hiragana and Katakana).

Grammar-wise, this is where things get tricky - because these are the first languages that got written, they're also the first languages we have proper evidence for
But it's assumed these languages came from proto-languages (e.g. Proto IndoEuropean, which gave birth to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Proto Germanic and Proto Slavic), and that many of these languages were sort of in a transitional stage.

For example, the Latin case endings could be thought of as post positions, but at the same time Latin has bona fide prepositions. So, it's likely the complexity of these languages was simply because they were slowly changing. For all we know, originally, the case system of Indo-European could have been simpler than the English grammar we use today, but over time people got slack and started making it irregular.*

Chinese also back in the day would have been a very easy language had it not been given such an abstract writing system. Even the tones probably wouldn't have taken proper form, and it's believed that tones and minute differences like that were caused by consonants and glottal stops that were deleted over time, and that tones were there to approximate these old sounds.

Ultimately, it's just bad timing I guess one could say, and the texts got written just as many languages were half way through changing into completely different things.

*(in regards to the case system: See here for more information, it's a rather complicated system at surface level but it's somewhat simple, just very different to what we do now - anyway, if you're interested further I suggest you have a look at things like these, they're extremely interesting in showing how languages once worked and from where all these messy modern day languages came).

Well, if you attribute the causative factor to those societies being in a linguistic state of flux which produced complicated writing systems, I think you have to ask why the texts came from those places and times, and not the mind-numbingly easy systems. After all, that would be a fantastic coincidence. However, there may just be too many factors to sort out in determining why some texts persevered and others fizzled out.

But what about Boroditsky's finding about added complexity (through engenderment) assisting cognitive function?

And there is Benjamin Whorf, who studied Native American languages extensively and raved about their superior expressiveness and likely enrichment of worldview. He compare Hopi to English in their exactitudes as that of a rapier to a bludgeon.

BradP:Well, if you attribute the causative factor to those societies being in a linguistic state of flux which produced complicated writing systems, I think you have to ask why the texts came from those places and times, and not the mind-numbingly easy systems. After all, that would be a fantastic coincidence. However, there may just be too many factors to sort out in determining why some texts persevered and others fizzled out.

But what about Boroditsky's finding about added complexity (through engenderment) assisting cognitive function?

And there is Benjamin Whorf, who studied Native American languages extensively and raved about their superior expressiveness and likely enrichment of worldview. He compare Hopi to English in their exactitudes as that of a rapier to a bludgeon.

Well, I believe that language and society's evolutionary paths are very close together, and that by the same time language had evolved a certain amount, so did the ideas and etc that gave birth to the classical texts. Either way, the proliferation of writing systems was, I think, the critical reason as to why all these enlightened texts pop up the way they did. Having a writing system allows ideas to be preserved in a more pure form, and allows discussion and evolution of ideas without becoming confused half way and forgetting all the major points.

Plus, all the ideas that went into these ancient texts didn't just appear with the complexity of language, they were there well before, and would have been born at the same time as language itself, and slowly evolving as culture evolved. Eventually, I think cultures reach a point where you have the language, culture, religion etc all coming together to a certain point, and that the writing system allows these things to be in a sense reconnected with each other in one of the earliest forms of precise data storage

In regards to the assistance of cognitive function by complexity through engenderment, I'm not familiar with it, is that related to what you mentioned before about gender helping thoughts in Spanish and French? (my dictionary says "engenderment: to bring into existence" which isn't too helpful! ). It's an interesting idea, I'd like to see how that would work out in a practical sense - perhaps it is linked to the mind's ability to classify information (certainly helpful).

(Also, complexity is like an illusion - think of what an Old Latin speaker would think when looking at Modern English - "O Deus! What misfortune has befallen this tongue!" - they'd probably be shocked by the lack of case markers, the lack of adjective/noun/verb agreement, and strange changing word order for questions - not to mention the fact that all of a sudden you had to know what a word is doing based on its position in a sentence and surrounding words alone This applies particularly to the Native American languages, they look a lot different, but they are still universally the same basic system of organising human thoughts (although I suspect Whorf may have had an interest in the vocabulary or word order, knowing of the theories he's associated with)).

Hm, I thought engender would mean "to give gender to", but I guess it traditionally means to bring into existence, as you said.

I would be hard pressed to believe that most revered texts developed at the same time that the rules of language were solidifying. There are just so many. And they do not really have to be ancient to be influential. What about the writings of modern philosophers, like Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel?

I don't even know how we would go about making a formal assessment of this. I guess you would have to look at the population of speakers of each language, multiply the number of speakers by the number of years they have or had existed, and then quantify the reach of their writings by looking at how far they have propagated in time and space. But then there would be other factors, like political or technological influences, that also affected their reach. All said, the whole method of looking for exemplary relics of wisdom from different tongues may be moot.

But I think complexity is indeed a real metric. Esperanto is not complex. It may be quite different and initially jarring to a non-westerner, but still would not require the diligent study that English or German would demand. A westerner cannot really learn Native American languages. One of the preeminent scholars of Navajo, mentioned in this podcast I keep referring to, studied the language for 40 years, spending many immersed in the Navajo culture, but still could only speak an awkward, rudimentary version of it. But I do believe Native Americans often learn English, which is one of the reasons so many of their languages are becoming extinct.

Benjamin Whorf was mostly interested in the different concepts that NA languages held axiomatic, such as the absence of any distinction between time and space, and the absence of a neat demarcation between past, present, and future. One of the primary ways the language forms such assumptions are through grammar.

Well, regarding philosophy, I wouldn't say German's particularly complicated is it? (I can't speak it, but spare the nuisance of a case system, it's fairly normal looking to me). In German's case, ironically it too is still changing from a postpositional language to a prepositional language (you're almost there, German! Just a few more case endings to ditch and you've made it! ).

I reckon the relationship between language, politics and technology as you mentioned would be a great sources to exploring this concept further. After all, Latin had so much stuff written in it because it somehow because the European lingua franca (and that all started from something akin to a Latin civil war waged by the Romans). But in the end, language is linked to science, science is linked to society, society is linked to politics, etc, and if one country gives birth to a great thinker, his ideas will surely inspire others etc, so it's sort of all related to a critical mass I assume.

To the extent of Esperanto, I would agree that there is a metric of sorts, but I doubt complexity plays a strong role provided the language still operates within sane human limits. Irregularity seems to be the biggest problem, which isn't so much based on complexity but more an evolutionary lack of adherence to the original structure of language. Navajo for example doesn't look very complex at all (just very alien to my eyes - which probably explains why it's so hard to assimilate to). (EDIT: On second though, tones, very small morphemes, and creative sentence structure has lead me to the belief that Navajo is more complicated than the average language )

I think what needs to be taken into account primarily would be:
-historical setting
-culture (which affects language more than the other way around I suspect)
-social setting
-stage of development with the language, especially with the written language
-nearby inspirations (e.g. like with the Greek/German philosophers - maybe languages with "G" attract philosophers... Let's change English to Genglish)
-are these thoughts actually unique or sophisticated, or infact highly natural and just clouded by social layers, or slap-in-the-face obvious (after you read it of course )

No doubt there may be more factors that could be added?

Further, I'd opine that Classical Chinese is a very simple language, grammatically speaking—or is that a mistaken impression?

I don't think the complexity of a grammar has anything to do with the sophistication of thoughts.

I think it might help if we look at all this from the point of view of a newborn. A newborn doesn't know of the discrete grammatical aspects that we've been talking about here (such as cases, moods, etc.), nor does s/he have anything to compare the input s/he receives against. What children learn in learning a language is actually how a given thought is to be expressed in that language. This itself would seem to indicate that thoughts and the language used to express them are distinct entities.

I think that in several cases (pun not intended), seemingly complicated nominal or verbal paradigms, or some extra moods with fancy names like 'the aorist' or 'the optative' are actually no heavier on the brain than the acquisition of vocabulary items, or the imbibing of which tone conveys what emotion, as long as you've started with a tabula rasa, and live in that linguistic milieu. It's all about communicating a thought: the child will absorb all of the information needed to do so pretty effortlessly and, I believe, with equal ease across the world.

As far as learning Navajo for 40 years with only limited success is concerned, I'd actually like to see a Navajo man (of, say, around 25 years of age) with no knowledge of English try to master English, with all its idiosyncracies and all its often maddeningly opaque idioms. With the condition, however, that he be denied access to any written material/podcasts/television broadcasts/radio shows, except perhaps the most elementary, which I think must have been a handicap the Navajo expert had to deal with. To be honest, I doubt if the Navajo will ever feel entirely at home in English. His complaints might even be the same ones some of us might make about Navajo: "English has a weird way of expressing things!".

I think I agree with the linguist Steven Pinker, who, in his extremely interesting and eminently readable book 'The Language Instinct' suggests that the 'language' of our thoughts is not the/a language we speak, but something more abstract and more universal - he calls this 'language' Mentalese.

I'd say that society only expresses such sophisticated thoughts when its had time to evolve, and the language evolves along the way as well.

I read Melvyn Bragg's book "The Adventure of English" and he talked about how simple English used to be. It developed over the years as the (more sophisticated) Normans invaded and brought new vocabulary and, as the British Empire grew, words were brought back from the colonies. As the English-speaking world developed the language became more complex.

I'm not sure what "complexity" is even referring to, here. What constitutes a "complex" grammar as opposed to a simple one?

We might take the position that irregularity contributes to complexity. But, in my opinion, all irregularity is is an increase in memory load without a corresponding increase in expression. To take just one example, I fail to see how having a different word for "be", depending on the pronoun it's paired with, increases the ability to express complex thoughts any more than does having a simple form (for example, "estas") used for all pronouns. The irregular form requires more memorization, but doesn't seemingly contribute anything other than (perhaps) variety.

I'm no linguist, so the following opinion may not be entirely correct, but it seems to me that the case systems of the various languages are simply attempts to cram more meaning into less space. They add conciseness to the languages - in effect, they are a shorthand for what Esperanto uses prepositions for. Again, this requires more memorization, but while there are benefits to reducing the size of expressions, I'm not convinced that this necessarily increases the sophistication of those expressions.

If there were a language whose expressions changed based on a combination of the gender of the speaker, the gender of who they are speaking to, the relative social ranks of the participants, whether it was nighttime or daytime, and whether they were talking about work or play, that would certainly pack a lot of meaning into just a few words. Certainly that would be a complex language. I'm not sure such conciseness adds to the sophistication, though; only the speed with which information is transmitted.

Even a language whose grammar is so stripped down that it doesn't allow compound sentences should (theoretically) be capable of expressing the most sophisticated thoughts. It would just take more space in which to express them.

I do think that there may be a level beneath which a language is so simple that it becomes difficult to express complex thoughts in. I don't know where that level is drawn, though. Toki Pona, for example, may be such a language (although I don't speak Toki Pona, so it's hard for me to accurately judge).