Sociological Linguistics

[Robert Orr]

>I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less
>ambiguous, and more expressive". I have asserted only that the
>proto-language, which was simple,  became more complex, less ambiguous, and
>more expressive over time.

R.M.W. Dixon suggests in his recent book "The Rise and fall of Languages"
that once the language facility was "discovered" by humans, language would
have developed rapidly, possibly in the space of a generation or two, and
the end result of that development would have been quite complex, comparable
to modern languages.

Whether this development took place once, or several times, is currently
beyond our capabilities to reconstruct.

Robert Orr