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Weapons, especially swords and guns. My cup runeth over with Hollywood sword and gun myths.Gun MythsIn the movies guns make all sorts of clicky-clacky sounds...all the time. All a Hollywood character has to do is raise a gun to eye level and somehow this sets off a riot of metallic clicks and snaps. If your gun ever does this, put it down immediately. Your gun is clearly suffering from a serious defect or malfunction, maybe a loose piece rattling around inside somewhere, and it is not safe to handle.In the movies all shotguns make a distinctive *cha-chunk* noise. Sometimes you'll hear this noise from off-screen and the camera pans to show us a man holding a double-barrel shotgun. Also, in movies all pump-action shotguns must be pumped at every opportunity, because it sounds all cool and stuff. FYI, pumping the action on a shotgun ejects the shell in the chamber. If you fire, then pump the action twice more, you will eject the spent shell and a perfectly good unfired shell.In movies guns can "go off" by accident if dropped or bumped. While it is theoretically possible for this to happen, in real life the chances are somewhere between "slim" and "none". In fairness to Hollywood, this once was very true. Many older guns are notoriously un-drop-safe. In fact the famous British Sten submachine gun was so prone to discharging when dropped that it could be used as an improvised grenade. Toss it through the window of a German pillbox and when it hit the ground it would empty its entire magazine and take out everyone inside. But modern gun manufacturers take great pains to avoid building a gun that can ever "go off" by accident and will voluntarily recall any model found to have that flaw.In movies, jammed = broken. If your gun jams it becomes useless and you must throw it away. In reality 99% of jams can be cleared in about 1-2 seconds with minimal effort. In Jurassic Park when the raptors attack Dr. Grant and the kids in the computer lab, Dr. Grant's shotgun jams offscreen and he drops it when they flee. But in the scene you can clearly see it's a simple stovepipe jam (a spent shell sticking out of the ejection port) which he could have cleared easily by simply plucking it out. He threw away a perfectly good shotgun.Being shot in the movies can blast someone right off their feet, or even across the room. In real life a gun powerful enough to do that would either blast itself right out of your hands or blast you back with roughly the same amount of force. (Ironically Hollywood used to get this one right. In old black-and-white Westerns when someone got shot they would just crumple to the ground. Apparently something went awry in the intervening years.)Being shot in the movies kills or at least drops you instantly. There are many examples throughout history of men being shot many times in the chest and barely breaking stride. In movies the only people who get to do that are main characters. On the other hand...In movies, being shot in the arm, shoulder, or leg is deemed "a flesh wound". While this may slow the hero down, it will never kill him. He will not be shown growing weaker and weaker from blood loss, nor will the injury have any lasting effects. The hero may be shown wearing his arm in a sling for a while but once the hole closes up the arm is good as new.Guns aren't nearly as loud in movies as they are in real life. Characters can even have indoor gun fights with no difficulty. In reality guns are very loud and shooting indoors without ear protection would hurt your ears a lot. Hearing loss is not uncommon among soldiers and police officers. And when was the last time you heard a character in an action movie complain about tinnitus?In movies, guns can be rendered almost perfectly silent with the use of a magical device called a "silencer".In movies, caliber = power. No exceptions. The larger the caliber the more powerful the gun is. In reality, many other factors also play into the "power" of a gun (which is a bit of a nebulous term anyway). Would it surprise you to learn that this actually fires a smaller caliber bullet (.357) than this (.41)?In movies, characters "dual-wield" pistols. No. This is stupid. You would never do this with any modern pistol. In fact you probably wouldn't do it with any pistol from any era. There is no advantage to doing this. Gunfighters in the Old West and in the era of black powder sometimes carried more than one pistol at a time, but this was just so they could quickly swap to the second gun after emptying the first one (the so-called "New York reload" technique).In historical movies, keeping your powder dry is not a concern for black powder weapons (looking at you Pirates of the Caribbean).Cannonballs in movies never bounce, even though historically this was a major strength of cannon warfare. Unlike arrows or catapults, if you undershot your target with a cannon the ball was likely to bounce right into the enemy lines. Hollywood seems to have gotten cannonballs mixed up with exploding mortar shells (also, they seem to think mortars didn't exist before the 20th century). One of the few things The Patriot got right was when it showed a cannonball skip off the ground and take off some poor schmuck's head.In Western movies if two veteran gunslingers notice each other they have to declare "this town ain't big enuff fer the two 'o us" and square off for a duel. In reality most veteran gunslingers seemed to believe that every town was "big enuff fer the two 'o us", and they would prove the town was big enough by staying the Hell away from each other. Probably because they were afraid some moon-brained city slicker would try to goad them into fighting. Which brings me to my next point...In the movies, "dueling" with pistols is a thing that happens all the time, especially in the Old West, and it's something that everyone does. If anyone so much as made fun of your hat the two of you had to meet in the street at High Noon, stand 10-20 paces apart, and then...draw! *bang-bang-thud* No. That's stupid. While some "quickdraw" duels are recorded in history, they are extremely rare. Dueling was not something that every common gunfighter was eager to do for the very obvious reason that they might get killed. Even many upper class men despised dueling and refused to engage in it themselves. George Washington famously forbade his officers from dueling because he didn't want them to die.Gun-twirling. This did not happen. Well okay, it might have happened...in the circus. Today there are some entertainers who specialize in artistic gun-twirling routines so there might have been a few back in the Old West, but these guns are NOT loaded and they are usually rendered inoperative as well just to be sure. Twirling a loaded gun is probably the stupidest and most unsafe thing you could possibly do outside of playing chicken with a train or having a staring contest with the sun."Gangsta"-style. AKA "holding your gun sideways like a fucking idiot".Fantasy/Medieval Weapon MythsIn movies, swords are often carried and drawn from the back. This is quite impossible for a sword of any considerable length. In the Middle Ages for greater comfort a warrior traveling a long distance might have carried a sword strapped to his back -- much like a modern soldier or hunter might sling a rifle over his shoulder -- but he would never have drawn the sword from that position. He would have taken the sword off his back and then drawn it. He might also have carried a smaller dagger or short sword on his hip that he could draw much faster if he were suddenly attacked.Movie sword fights always involve two guys swinging their swords wildly and clanging them against the opponent's sword, and the fighters always parry edge-to-edge. In reality parrying with the edge of your sword will ruin it, and violently clashing your blade against your opponent's weapon would leave your hands very sore afterward. Historically fighters always tried to parry edge-to-flat and always preferred to redirect blows rather than absorb the full force. And on that note...Movie sword fights between two fully-armored knights are portrayed the same way as unarmored or lightly armored fights. Just a series of blade-against-blade clashes and slashes. Wrong. A man in plate armor is basically immune to cuts and slashes. In real life the way to deal with a man in full armor was to use your sword like a lever and grapple him to the ground. Or you could smash with the pommel to stagger him and then knock him off his feet. Then once he's on the ground you could pull out one of these and shank him in the armpit or the eyeballs. Even Samurai did this. Jujutsu was invented for grappling an armored opponent to the ground where he could be easily killed.In movies swords can be "cut in half" by other swords. No. Physics does not work that way, and history has never recorded a sword hewn in twain by another sword. Some poorly made swords might have broken when struck with another sword, but no self-respecting noble (the only type of person who would have been allowed to carry a sword in the Middle Ages) would ever be caught wearing a sword that shitty.In movies "throwing knives" are all the rage and the perfect assassination weapon. That's just silly. Unless you were extremely desperate to win a fight you would never throw your knife, because then you'd be minus a knife. Throwing away a perfectly good weapon rarely helps matters. And if you want to assassinate someone there are a lot of much better, much more reliable options than throwing a knife at them. Knife-throwing is a carnival trick, not a martial skill. If throwing knives were as effective in real life as they are in fiction, everyone would have used them. But almost no one actually did.Double-bitted axes are common battlefield weapons in fantasy media. No, just no. In real life double-bitted axes are universally felling axes used for chopping wood. Battle axes are always single-bitted, with maybe a spike or a hammer thing on the other side. But never double-bitted. There is literally no reason to use a double-bitted battle axe.Speaking of battle axes, in the movies they are almost universally way bigger than any real battle axe ever was. Vikings or barbarian types in movies are always running around with these huge axes with blades the size of their heads, often wielded one-handed. The biggest that battle axes ever got was probably the Dane Axe, which was admittedly pretty darn big, but that was meant to be used with both hands (for the record, a Halberd is a pole-arm, not an axe). One-handed battle axes were more Tomahawk-sized and in Europe they were usually paired with a shield.In movies, weapons can be dual-wielded. Oh dear. I wish I knew who it was that put the idea of "dual-wielding" in the heads of Hollywood directors so I could kick him in the balls. This is pretty much pure fiction. While fighting styles for dual-wielding swords do exist (Miyamoto Musashi famously created one) they are really more curiosities or performance art than anything else. There is precious little historical record of those styles ever being used on the battlefield. (Exceptions that prove the rule: Fighting with sword and dagger or dual-wielding with small weapons like knives. In sword and dagger styles you strike with a sword and parry with the dagger, which makes this style just a modified version of sword-and-shield fighting. And in dual-knife styles the moves are generally unarmed combat techniques slightly modified to accommodate a knife in each hand, and even then their effectiveness in a fight is questionable. Not at all the same as the "dual sword" or "dual axe" styles you see in the movies. The point remains, if these "dual-wielding" styles were as effective in real life as they are in the movies then everyone would have done it.)Sword fighters in movies often perform elaborate "spin" moves that expose their back to the opponent. I hope I don't have to explain why taking your eyes off the guy trying to kill you is a stupid idea.In fantasy movies, archers are often ordered to draw their bows back and hold them there until the commander orders them to "fire". This is wrong for two reasons. First, no one in those days would have ever told an archer to "fire". That term originates from the age of gunpowder. They would have said "loose" or "release" or something like that. Second, no one would ever order an archer to draw an arrow back and hold it there for any length of time. It takes a lot more strength than people realize to draw a bow, and holding it at full draw will just tire you out.Weapons terminology is all over the place in Hollywood movies. This is a real mace (one of several types of maces). It's a stick with a smashy-thing on the end that doesn't have spikes on it. When it has spikes it's called a "morning star". And when the smashy-thing is attached to the stick with a chain it's called a "flail". And for the love of God, don't ever ask a movie director to explain the difference between a longsword, a greatsword, a broadsword, and an arming sword.Sword fighters often make the baffling decision to hold their sword in a "reverse grip" or "Zatoichi" style. I just...fucking...why would you ever do this? There is literally no good reason to hold a sword like that during a fight. It reduces your reach down to basically nothing (negating one of the primary benefits of having a sword in the first place), reduces the power of your strikes, reduces the strength of your grip, and requires you to use a lot of weird and unnatural movements to strike at your opponent. It also doesn't look like you could parry with it very well. I don't know why any movie does this. It doesn't even really look cool, it just looks...unusual. I have read that the shorter reach might be useful if you were fighting in a confined area like a house, but if you think you might get into a fight in a tight space there's nothing stopping you from carrying a smaller weapon. And indeed throughout history and across multiple cultures, warriors did exactly that. Ironically the Japanese Samurai are the warriors most often associated with this "reverse grip" style, even though the official symbol of the Samurai was the right to wear a daisho (a katana paired with a shorter wakizashi) in public. If the "reverse grip" was just as effective for indoor fighting why would the Samurai bother with the extra hassle of wearing two swords? So I'm back to my initial conclusion: no good reason to do this.In fantasy movies you often see characters using "weird" weapons, like a double-ended sword, or a sword with a bizarre shape, or a weapon with a strange way of killing someone, or sometimes things that aren't even weapons but somehow are used as weapons anyway. Invariably the person using these weapons will be difficult or impossible to beat, because they are so unusual. Hate to burst your bubble, nerds, but if weird weapons were as unbeatable as movies would have you believe, everyone would have used them. And yet they didn't. So what does that tell you? On that note...Scythes. I don't know who, I don't know when, but at some point someone convinced anime and fantasy writers that a farmer's scythe would make a highly effective battlefield weapon. That's. Just. Stupid. Scythes are not weapons. Here's why:More things I just thought of!In the movies, guns can be fired easily and accurately while running or riding in a vehicle. Not. A. Chance. Accurate shooting is nigh-impossible unless you are standing still. The only time a modern soldier might do something like this is in a covering fire situation. Spraying bullets wildly in the general direction of the enemy will make them keep their heads down, making it easier to escape or outmaneuver them. (Exception: The anti-personnel machine gun on a tank. This might be used while the tank is moving slowly to prevent enemy infantry from sabotaging the tank.) Which brings up another point...In crime movies (less so these days but still pops up occasionally) when cops are engaged in a high-speed car chase with some criminals you'll often see the cops firing on the criminals' car in an attempt to...wound it? I have no idea. The point is, this is several different kinds of wrong. Notice how you never see the aftermath of these "exciting" car chases where the paramedics have to come and help all the innocent bystanders hit by stray bullets. If there ever was a cop who tried this, I guarantee you he got fired the next day.Someone else pointed out the *shing* sound that movie swords always seem to make when you draw them. This doesn't bother me as much as some of the other things I touched on, but nonetheless it deserves to be mentioned. Real scabbards were made of wood or boiled leather and they were often lined with fur on the inside (this way the scabbard could be continuously oiling your sword for you with every draw). But that *shing* is clearly the sound of metal against metal. In order to get that every time you would have to have a piece of metal on the inside of your scabbard constantly grinding against your sword and bluntening the edge (I'm not sure "bluntening" is a word but I don't care).How many fantasy movies have we all seen where a character fails to properly clean his sword? You know the scene I'm talking about; his sword is dripping with blood from an epic battle or a grueling street brawl, and he just shoves the dirty bloody sword right back into his scabbard! That scabbard is now basically ruined. The inside is now soaked with congealing blood, which is going to attract mold and rust and will probably start to smell after a while. And there's no way to clean it without tearing it open which will ruin it anyway. Worse yet, if that blood dries while the sword is still sheathed it'll get stuck the next time he tries to pull it out. I would love to see a fantasy movie where some badass swordsman gets his head kicked in because the blood on his sword glued it into his scabbard.The katana. Oh dear Lord, the katana. Never have so many spent so much time mentally masturbating over a simple piece of steel. We all know how movies portray the katana: As the ultimate uber-sword. The King of all swords that is undefeatable in combat. Bullshit. The katana has been so horrendously over-romanticized I hardly know where to begin. To start with, fanboys often say that the shape of the katana makes it the finest cutting weapon ever made and it could cut through trees and sliced heavy machine gun barrels in half during WWII. NO. That story about katanas slicing through machine guns did not happen and I defy anyone to prove that it did. Furthermore, there are a number of swords with much more cutting power than the katana. The Indian Talwar and other swords with a similar shape have far superior cutting power because they have a much more dramatic curve. Nor is the katana the most durable sword ever made. A European longsword will bend and flex when force is applied to it, allowing it to take huge amounts of abuse and bounce back. Try to flex a katana and it will bend...and stay bent. And then it's pretty much ruined. People will also claim that katanas are "marvels of engineering" or what have you. Well...that's sort of true, but not in the way that katana fanboys usually mean. The traditional katana forging technique (folding steel over and over and quench-hardening it to have varying levels of hardness) is not unique to Japan. The Celts were doing basically the same thing with their own swords about 2000 years before the Japanese got the idea. And the reason the Europeans stopped forging swords in this way was because...they didn't have to anymore. Which brings me to how the katana actually is impressive: The katana is a feat of engineering, not because of some esoteric forging technique or because its form is mechanically superior to other swords, but simply because of the fact that Japanese iron is amazingly poor. Japan has almost no natural iron deposits to speak of (I believe the CIA World Factbook lists their natural metal resources as "negligible") and the few deposits that were present tended to be very poor quality with lots of nasty impurities. Also Japan went through several long periods of extreme isolationism so there was not a lot of good-quality metal ore coming to them until much later. The pattern-welding technique used by Japanese swordsmiths was meant to compensate for the extremely poor quality of the ore they were forced to work with. The fact that they were able to come up with something even serviceable is definitely an achievement. Props all around for that. But, that doesn't mean their swords were superior to other swords from other cultures. The reason the Europeans stopped using pattern-welding is because they discovered huge deposits of really nice iron and they were happy to trade this iron all over the continent. They could afford to ditch pattern-welded blades because...they literally could afford it. They had so much good-quality iron ore they were practically cleaning it out of their belly buttons. This allowed Europeans to make what are called mono-steel swords, meaning swords with a consistent composition and hardness. When you really think about it, this constant fanboyism over the katana is almost racist. Not only does it implicitly disparage the great achievements and ingenuity of swordsmiths from all other cultures, it breathes life back into old racial stereotypes of the "Mysterious East" and the "inscrutable Oriental".

This question is based on a false premise.First of all, what makes a language sophisticated? A larger vocabulary with finer nuances? If so, how to you even measure the size of its vocabulary? How widespread does the usage of a word (or the passive knowledge of what it means) to be to count as a word of that language? Many parts of speech are open classes, which means they are ever-expanding, fluctuating, with old words falling out of use and new words being borrowed from other languages, coined, arising from new distinctions and dynamic ways to create meaning by multiple tools where many expressions that are used frequently enough are lexicalised and become a word of that language.Or is it a complicated grammar? What is a complicated grammar? Many grammaticalized categories? Expressing grammatical categories mostly synthetically, as inflectional forms of other words, as opposed to periphrastically, as free words? Is a language complex if it has a lot of complex inflectional paradigms with many morphological and morphonological alternations? That is only one way to measure complexity.You can have different complexity at various domains of grammar. You can have different levels of complexity in semantics, in syntax, in morphology and in phonology. For instance, you can have a vast phoneme inventory, which means a lot of sounds that all distinguish meaning where the slightest difference in pronunciation can make a difference in what a word means, and speakers have to memorize all these sounds, have to master their articulation, and have to pay attention to these nuances when they listen to other people. But the same language can have a less complex morphology where words usually appear in the same form and don’t alternate, such as the English inflectional number distinction where cat and cats are two forms of the same word that express a grammaticalized category (number) by means of a suffix.You can have different grammatical categories that are at different stages of complexity. For instance, you can have a head-marking language with elaborate verbal inflection, where you can express a lot of categories on the verb, but the same language might have very little inflection for nouns. Such a languages might have a lot of tense distinctions, aspect distinctions, mood distinctions, agreement markers … but may not have grammatical cases or number. If language A has a lot of tenses but no cases, and language B has a lot of cases but no tenses, which one is more sophisticated? How do you tell?Languages as a whole are never complex or simple. Some parts of the grammar of a language might be complex or simple. For instance, if a language can mark a lot of categories on a word and attach a lot of affixes, you might call its morphology complex. But even here you might specify what you mean, because in other regards the morphology might be less complex compared to other languages. If the language has little cumulative exponence where multiple categories are fused into one affix with elaborate cross-combinations, but instead you have a transparent one-to-one relationship between meaning and form, that makes the morphology less complex. If you have few inflectional classes and little allomorphy, that makes the morphology less complex.Most of the time, there is a trade-off between various domains of grammar. Complexity in one domain must be compensated by less complexity in another domain because if you go too much into the extremes, the language cannot fit the practical or cognitive demands of the speakers any more, and the language will naturally shift toward a less extreme position. This is why languages are usually very balanced when it comes to complexity.Think of languages as a trade-off between a) the need to communicate as much information as you need, and to be as precise and nuanced as possible, b) the need to express this in a short time and with little articulatory effort and c) to make it learnable for new generations of native speakers. These demands are contradictory. You cannot satisfy one without neglecting the other.If you focus on a) and you try to give communicate a lot of information, you’ll end up talking more which is not economic from an articulary point of view. We are naturally lazy, we want to keep out utterances as short and easy to articulate as possible, we do not want to overstrain the muscles of our articulators (such as our tongue and lips, if we speak an oral language, or our hands if we speak a sign language). But of course, if we mumble too much, meaning gets lost, distinctions are neutralized because you cannot tell the difference between two distinctive sounds any more, we drop important parts of the word. So we neglect a) if we focus on b).We could solve this problem if we make our language more concise and compact as possible and stuff as much meaning as possible into very short words. This is what many people might call “complex” - very economic yet very expressive. Such a language would have very much cumulative exponence where you express multiple meanings in one linguistic element. For instance, instead of combining different words such as small, red and ball to express the concept “small red ball”, you’d have all these meanings in one word that cannot be be further analyzed into different parts that would express the individual components respectively. Pretend that the word zem means “small red ball”, the word bui means “small green ball”, the word ehe means “large red ball”, the word fuye means “large red box”, and you’d have a word for any possible cross-combination of size, color and objects, and you’d have to memorize all the cross-combinations. Without a doubt, in such a language expressing a complex idea takes a very short time … but needless to say, such a language will be harder to memorize and eventually native speakers won’t be able to learn the language any more, and they will naturally simplify it. Human languages cannot be infinitely complex because eventually we will reach our cognitive limits. Our brains are not computers that can store so much data and process it within such a short time. There is an artificial language - Ithkuil - that has taken this principle of economic, concise density to the extremes. As far as I know, few people have been able to learn it, and those who speak it need a few minutes to come up with simple phrases even after a lot of practice.Ithkuil owes some of its complexity to a large phoneme inventory, which conflicts with the articulatory laziness in another way. If you have only a small number of distinctive sounds, there are only so many syllables you can possibly create. If you want a lot of words in order to express a lot of nuanced meanings, you’ll have to stack more and more syllables together, and make the words longer and longer, so you’ll have to talk more. If you introduce more distinctive sounds to make up more possible syllables so you can express more concepts in monosyllabic words, you’ll have to resort to difficult, complicated sounds. If you have only few sounds in your inventory, you can do with those that are universally easy to articulate for humans for anatomic reasons - /i/, /a/, /u/, /t/, /s/, /j/ … but if these aren’t enough for you, you will need fancy sounds that don’t come as easily, where we must strain our muscles and make more efforts to articulate them. So, in terms of our articulatory laziness - either we strain our muscles because we speak very long words and sentences, or we strain our muscles because we use fancy, difficult sounds. We can minimize this problem only if we settle for less precise meaning.Language evolution is compromising and balancing different needs. A language is a pendulum that swings between the various needs I outlined here - at some time it will be less expressive but articulatorily easy, at some times it will be articulatorily difficult and more expressive, at some times it will have more forms to memorize, at some times it will have less forms to memorize. But it won’t ever get too close to an extreme. It won’t ever oversatisfy one demand and neglect the others. Language is a self-regulating system that evolves such that it satisfies all the demands the speakers have. If a language is not expressive enough, speakers will come up with more expressions, create, lexicalize and grammaticalize meaning, borrow words from other languages, come up with nuances. People will find a way to talk about complicated, elaborate ideas, no matter how, and if enough people do this, the ways that are common to express these ideas will fossilize and become part of the language. If a language is too complicated from an articulatory point of view, people will mumble, simplify sound distinctions, pronounce fancy, complicated sounds in a less complicated way and merge the sound with a less complicated similar sound, and shorten words. If a language is too complicated to learn, new generations of speakers will simplify the language and they will not pick up some distinctions in meaning and grammar that their parents make.So languages become more complex and less complex and more complex and less complex. It’s not unidirectional. If language evolution was unidirectional, there would be an objectively perfect language, and all languages would converge and strive toward that language. There is no such thing as a perfect language. There are various ways to balance contradicory demands, that currently prioritize different things, and no way to solve this is superior to the other. If you think about it … languages have been evolving for millenia. If language evolution was unidirectional, don’t you think languages would be much more similar to each other by now, and don’t you think the convergence would be more noticeable?The above paragraph was an oversimplification because, as I said above, even within one domain of grammar, a language is composed of numerous grammatical categories, each of which is at its own stage of complexity. So if you picture a cycle that goes from no complexity to complexity to no complexity, it mostly applies to parts of a language as opposed to an entire language. For instance, in a language the speakers might consistently use a particular expression to indicate time. At some point, it is not interpreted literally any more, it becomes an element of grammar, a grammatical modifier, the rules of its usage change, it is extended to new contexts, because expressing time this way is so convenient and used so frequently speakers reanalyze it as a grammatical tense marker. The language has grammaticalized tense as a new category. As it is bothersome from an articulatory point of view to enunciate this word clearly and carefully all the time, speakers reduce it, mumble it, especially because it is so predictable now that it appears in so many utterances. Grammatical elements are usually more likely to be reduced than lexical elements. After a while, speakers may attach it to another word until it is clearly part of another word, for instance a suffix, and then there might be a point where you can’t really tell the stem apart from the suffix any more and there is a word with an inherent tense marking such as the English verb form went which inherently contains the verb go and the past tense. Such an evolution builds complexity because it gives rise to very concise, dense forms with a lot of meaning within few words, but from an articulatory point of view, it is also a loss of complexity because it happens due to laziness to enunciate the various meaning components clearly until they are somehow merged within one word. At some point, the tense marking in the language will have become so complex native speakers reach their cognitive limits, and they won’t memorize these different word forms with different complicated tense markings any more, and they will lose the ability to mark tense grammatically in sentences … but as a language won’t get too close the extreme with little expressivity, they will make up for it and come up with new ways to express time, because expressing time is a communicative need, and speakers will find ways to express what they want to say. This new way to express time may or may not be grammaticalized as a new tense marker.To put it simply, individual grammatical categories - such as tense marking - go through an everlasting cycle of being expressed in a more lexical and less morphologically complex way, to a more complex way, to a too complex way which results in a loss, to being reinvented in a less complex way. Mind you, this account is an oversimplification, because this cycle is not as deterministic as it sounds. Elements of language can stagnate at one point for a long time.As languages are composed of multiple elements of grammar, each of which goes through their own cycle at its own pace and is at its own stage in the cycle, at every point in history in every language you will find elements that are gaining complexity whereas other elements are losing complexity, and some elements that are simultaneously gaining and losing complexity depending on what you mean by complexity.So, to answer your question: Every language is becoming more sophisticated right now. And every language is declining right now. If your observations suggest that most languages are only declining, it is selection bias - you are focussing on the elements that the language known to you are losing, while ignoring all the complexity they are gaining. That is typical for human perception, and also for human judgement of foreign languages. When we compare foreign languages to our own languages, we tend to think of them as primitive at first glance because we mostly notice the expressivity and complexity they lack compared to our own language while we don’t see the elements where these languages are more expressive and complex than ours.