Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
Sophistication, on the other hand, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is more sophisticated, flowery descriptive speech or very simple speech that communicates complicated ideas? Arguments can be made for or against Jane Austen or Terence Tao as being more sophisticated.
Latin allows one to say little at great length while sounding very smart. Which a classical education teaches us to value. But when we say things simply we can think and express more complicated things. Which is more sophisticated?
Please put me on the side of Terrence Tao.
> Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
This assumes that positional languages work better or are more efficient, but that is not clear to me.
"flowery descriptive speech" a la Jane Austen communicates complex ideas. It is just that different subject have different concept of what constitute useful complexity.
Both Terry Tao and Jane Austen could have written their works in almost any language with little impediments.
In particular here one of the scientific advantages of English is not its simple morphology but its permissive lexicon, where creating new word for new concept is a common occurrence.
If by historical accident we happened to speak Latin to this day it is likely that the major loss (compared to English) would be puns.
I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages).
Latin is the same way. Having spent a fair amount of time in it, I can see its beauty and sophistication.
Modern English is great. I love it, especially the size of the vocabulary. But it's a comparatively clumsy language, and it frequently abuses prepositions. Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings. I don't struggle with those in Latin. The language is elegant. It doesn't take Cicero to communicate clearly because of the grammar. But in the hands of Cicero it's like fine art.
For every Cicero and Virgil, there were a thousand who had said "Fuck I got shitfaced at that whorehouse and I'm fucking sure that bitch took my purse, if mom finds out I'm dead LOL FML," or something like that, except in impeccable classical Latin.
But if we're just talking about personal taste, there's no real reason to debate it with other people, since it's arbitrary.
> Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings.
Now this, on the other hand, is an objective, quantifiable statement that regardless of taste is either true or false. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that it is not in fact true, and that you only believe English sentences are more likely to be ambiguous than Latin ones is because you speak and write English better than Latin and so are more intuitively aware of its weirdness.
Again, I don't agree with your worldview. The reason I referred to the Sistine Chapel was to provide an analogy: it doesn't merely fit my preferences better than my sketch. It is objectively better. There is something in the painting that is real. The beauty is real.
But on your view, the beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree. Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it.
ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.
Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?
Which is not true at all (ask any historical linguist) and only appears to be true if you restrict yourself to looking at Western European language.
But in reality, there are ancient analytic/isolating languages (e.g., Classical Chinese), and contemporary highly fusional ones (e.g. Finnish, Navajo).
> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them
You're assuming loss of grammar over time is a mark of sophistication, but it's hard to see how. I think you have it backwards.
Literary, classical Greek and Latin absolutely destroy English in their sophistication.