Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from.

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.

I think that's a romaniticized view of Latin, probably helped by the fact that real Latin speakers are long dead.

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.

OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constraints, that's fine.

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.

> if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages...But if we're just talking about personal taste...it's arbitrary

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.

Comparing English to Latin is not like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a sketch. It's more like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a modernist painting.

Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?

That’s still a bit dubious IMO as it implies that Latin is the way it is because it reflects an older, “classical” style.

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).

By the same objective measure by which a statue of Venus is more beautiful than a cube made of concrete (despite of the latter possessing more symmetry). The measure could be: the number of people saying so; the shape of the distribution of color in a brain scan of an observer, etc.

A statue of Venus took creativity and skill to create that a cube of concrete didn’t. There’s no meaningfully similar statement you could make about Latin vs. English.