A word of explanation about language primitivity

I happened to re-read a comment the other day and suddenly it occurred to me that I have to clarify one thing some people seem to have misunderstood:

A language being primitive and a language being easy to learn are totally not the same thing.

Thai is more primitive than English, but it's much harder to learn (unless you're Laotian, of course).

Hanji ideograms are harder to memorise than the Latin alphabet, but if Chinese were written in Pinyin instead of Hanji, it would be easier to learn all right, but its expressiveness (its capacity of distinguishing nuances of meaning) would be exactly the same as before.

Or if Latin had only 1 declension instead of 5, it would make it no more and no less expressive.

If English had 20 different ways of building the noun plural (like, you'd have to say "desktix" instead of "desks" and "chairlor" instead of "chairs"), it would neither increase nor decrease its expressiveness. It would be different if "chairlor" meant one thing and "chairtix" meant another thing. That would increase your choice of expressing various meanings. But if "desktix" and "chairlor" were the exact same grammatical form, and you'd just have to remember that you mustn't say "desklor" or "chairtix", then it would be a mere complication without any useful purpose. It would make the language harder to learn but not more expressive.

Therefore, a greater or smaller regularity of declination or conjugation has nothing to do with how primitive a language is. What matters is how many different meanings you can express. If a language doesn't have a past tense, it doesn't matter if all the verbs are irregular. You still have to talk about the past in a roundabout way, so in this particular respect this language is more primitive than a language whose verbs have a past tense.

Let me repeat this one more time to make it absolutely clear:

Speaking of expressiveness, the point is not how difficult a language is to learn. The point is how precisely you can say things.

If A-language says

"alcoholics are repulsive"

and B-language says

"human many drink much much fire water me much much no like"

then B-language is not only inefficient, needing many more sounds to express the same thought, it's also likely to lose a lot of meaning along the way, because when a simple 3-word phrase like "alcoholics are repulsive" becomes a much longer 12-word phrase, then a phrase like "I feel it's intolerant to hate alcoholics" might be so long and complicated that, firstly, one would have to read it several times to comprehend it, and, secondly, no one would bother to say it in conversations. Scientific works in B-language would certainly be much longer than they are in A-language, require much more effort to understand, and still contain much more inexactness.

To bring a more down-to-earth example, in Russian you add one prefix and one suffix and "играть" becomes "доиграться", "считать" becomes "досчитаться", and so on.

How many words would one need to adequately translate "доигрался!" into English? I have no idea. Now, far be it from me to deny that there are professional translators or otherwise linguistically talented people who can find a way to convey that meaning adequately in English, but the point is that in everyday language, native English speakers just don't bother with such nuances because it's too complicated and lengthy, and Russians routinely use this grammatical construction in their everyday speech and Internet chats because it's no effort at all. And this is just one example out of many. I can't even begin to describe (especially in English) my utter fascination with all those "выпросила", "доотдохнул" and "подуспокоилась". In English, you get a mere skeletal description of the facts and have to fill up all the subtle nuances with your imagination. Either that or wade through cumbersome sentences laying out with great trouble a mood Russian gets across with a word or two.

The same goes for my native language which is very different from Russian. I write a lot in English, and it's part hilarious and part horrifying to see every now and then how I would have to use 10 or 20 words in English for really elementary things. In my language, you just say it without a second thought, in English you have to think really hard how to explain what that nuance means. Needless to say, most times I don't bother. I just say something simpler and shorter. So do (needless to say) the native English speakers themselves.