In this post I would like to propose another way in which human language could be said to be irreducibly complex. What I would like to suggest is that, from the standpoint of logic, the development of language would have required the existence of some language from the start, and that even in its earliest stage, human language would have exhibited a certain level of complexity . My reasoning follows logically from a key insight about language made by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure contended that the relationship between an idea and the word that expresses that idea is necessarily arbitrary. For example, there is no logical necessity that a certain animal should be called a dog in English (or chien in French, gou in Chinese, and so forth). The relationship between concept and word is completely arbitrary (it is true there are some words whose sound does reflect something about the idea signified by the word, but they are relatively few in proportion to the total number of words in a language).
If the relationships between words and the ideas they express are arbitrary, then how did those relationships become established? In other words, how did words (sounds or symbols) acquire meaning? The most straighforward explanation would be that there came to be a shared understanding among speakers of a certain language as to what idea a particular word signified, and such a shared understanding could have come only through language. Moreover, that language would have required a certain level of complexity--at least in terms of the size of its lexicon (vocabulary) --in order for the concept expressed by a particular word to have been clearly grasped. For instance, returning to our example of the word dog, it would have required a fairly sophisticated vocabulary to make clear what dog meant, as opposed to other four-legged animals, or even other mammals. If this was the case with a relatively concrete concept like dog, how much more sophisticated a vocabulary would have been required to define the meaning of an abstract concept like "love!"
In short, it can be argued that language is irreducibly complex in at least two ways--certain relationships among the various elements of language are essential for language to function and human language even in its initial stage had to exhibit a certain level of sophistication in order for language to further develop. In future posts, I hope to elaborate further on this irreducible complexity of language.
Image of Ferdinand de Saussure from wikipedia.org