Complexity or copia? Latin versus Greek in the sixteenth century

In this paper, I argue that sixteenth-century grammarians did not operate with a concept of linguistic complexity. Instead, in their intuitive comparisons of languages, they started from the widespread humanist concept of copia, “abundance”. Focusing on contrastive discussions of Latin and Greek, I aim to illustrate how the copia concept structured their assessment of these and other languages, especially the European vernaculars. In Latin-versus-Greek contrastive descriptions, found especially often in Greek grammars of the time, Greek usually emerged as the most copious language due to such “extra” categories as the article, dual, aorist, and middle voice. There were, however, respects in which Latin enjoyed more copia, such as certain nominal forms of the verb and the ablative case. Finally, I offer some reflections on the relationship of the copia concept to modern notions of “complexity” and “difficulty”, arguing for the importance of factoring in cultural circumstances in complexity research