Which of the Big Romance Languages has the highest number of tenses?
What does big mean?
By big romance languages I mean: Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish, which according to wikipedia have 64, 77, 221 and 480 million native speakers respectively. There are many other Romance languages which we will not take into account in this definition, the next biggest ones would be Romanian (24 mln) and Catalan (4 mln).
Ephemeral complexity
It is very difficult to define what the most complicated grammar means. Even if we try to compare languages such as Hungarian (considered by many online bloggers to be one of the most grammatically complicated languages) and Bahasa Indonesia (considered to be one of the simplest languages grammar wise) it’s not straightforward to say which language has a more complex grammar. It is difficult because even linguists and polyglots do not agree what grammar complexity is.
In practice, too often we face logical fallacies like:
Polish has 7 grammatical cases, Russian has 6 grammatical cases. Therefore Polish is more complicated.
Hungarian could be considered a language with 18 grammatical cases. Does it mean that it is 3 times as complex as Russian? No, it’s almost certainly not.
