When I was learning Spanish in Central America, I met people there leaning English. As we would help each other learn, they always commented how lucky I was to be learning Spanish because all the tenses and general regularity made it easy to learn, but they thought English was so difficult to learn because of the seeming lack of rules and regularity.

In some regards English is simpler, but in other ways it is more complex in order to compensate for what’s lost in simplification elsewhere. English is simplified morphologically, but word order does a lot of heavy lifting instead, and it’s often apparent when speaking to someone who hasn’t yet mastered the language.

There is a relevancy bias here. From the perspective of a highly literate society we see fewer grammar rules as simpler. But is it, really? It is substituting one complexity for another. English has fewer noun cases, but a multitude of prepositional phrases that are really hard to keep straight.

The grammar of language tends swing back and forth on these factors, perhaps some guided by literacy and the rest a random walk, and what is “simpler” to us might be a subjective statement based on what we speak now.

More concise and nuanced but interestingly with a lower information density.