Reading a little about Gothic. It seems like a “Germanic version of Latin” in that it’s so heavily inflected.
One thing that I wonder about is:
- Proto-Indo-European was very complex
- Its descendant languages (Greek, Latin, Hindi, German etc.) are simpler
- PIE was around about 5,000 - 6,000 years ago
- Language is likely to be at least 50,000 years old (ca. earliest cave paintings)
- So were the ancestors of PIE even more complex?
- And when and why was there a change from linguistic complication to linguistic simplification?