Language is fantastically complex. Its built-in means of combining and recombining (nesting) of its various levels have suggested to many leading linguists that language is theoretically infinite though not practical so in everyday usage.(1)____(2)____ It almost sounds too complex to be able to detect any significant leveling out of language any more than one could detect by observation that the sun is burning itself out.
As far as I am conscious no linguist seriously purports that the restructuring process of language overrides the streamlining process resulted in a qualitative positive development of language.(3)____(4)____ If we decide that language did originally develop, possibly evolving animal communication, we can only do so by assuming evolution to be a universally valid principle This type of a priori reasoning was the basic fallacy of pre-Nineteenth Century "speculative grammar" which was pre-scientific in modern sense of the word.(5)____(6)____(7)____
However, the observable data neither indicate that such a period of pre-historic development even existed, nor they suggest a cause of the subsequent state of equilibrium or process of simplification that would have to have come into operation at some time after such a pre-historic development.(8)____(9)____ Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent linguists of the twentieth century, has indicated that human language and animal communication are not even comparative entities, they are so different.(10)____