Science Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is puncturing a comforting myth: that the “simple” look of a language’s grammar tells you anything reliable about how complex it actually is. French and German are a sly pairing here because they’re stereotyped in opposite ways. French often gets marketed (especially to Anglophone learners) as streamlined and elegant; German gets tagged as a rule-bound machine with intimidating morphology. Sapir’s move is to say: both stereotypes are bad analytics.

The key phrase is “apparent grammatical simplicity.” He’s pointing at the surface cues that non-linguists seize on - fewer case endings here, a cleaner-looking verb paradigm there - and calling them “misleading.” In Sapir’s scientific worldview, a language can shed visible inflections and still carry the same informational load by redistributing it into word order, function words, agreement patterns, idiomatic constraints, or even phonological alternations. “Simplicity” doesn’t disappear; it migrates.

The intent isn’t to humble language learners; it’s to discipline description. Sapir, writing in an era when linguistics was fighting both Victorian philological prestige hierarchies and crude “primitive vs. civilized” rankings of languages, is warning against using grammar as a proxy for cultural worth or intellectual capacity. French and German serve as convenient, politically unthreatening examples: if even Europe’s “high-culture” languages can fool you with appearances, the whole ranking impulse collapses.

Under the calm tone is a sharper claim: what looks easy is often just what your biases have trained you to see.