Short: Infinite Fractal Complexity
This episode, George gives a short discussion of the idea of language as having infinite fractal complexity, and what this means for conlangers building fictional worlds. Special Mention: Resources on the Line 3 protest: Stop Line 3 , Center for Protest Law and Litigation , Sierra Club Fact Sheet , Line 3 Legal Defense Fund Original Script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast abou t constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. Today, I’m going to talk a little about the realities of what naturalistic conlangers are trying to simulate. What does it mean for a language to look natural or realistic, and can a conlanger actually create something as complex as a natural language? I’m going to suggest that you ultimately can’t, but I also think that you don’t have to. Most people’s goals in conlanging will not really approach that, and I’m going to talk a little bit about how to decide what you really need out of your conlang. Instead of doing my normal Patreon pitch, I wanted to draw attention to something I think is important to point to. You may have heard of Line 3, the pipeline that is being built in Minnesota to bring tar sands from Alberta into Wisconsin. This pipeline is going through Anishnaabe land. It has the potential to pollute waters through much of the United States, and it’s going to contribute greatly to climate change. I would encourage you guys to go to stopline3.org. I’m also going to link a couple of other resources in the shownotes, and I have decided to make a small donation to the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, which is providing some legal defense funds to people who are protesting the pipeline. I would encourage people to learn about what’s going on here. Of course, there are many important reasons to oppose Line 3. It’s going to have huge ecological impacts. It’s going to impact water in a huge area. It’s going to contribute to climate change. And it is going through treaty land. I, personally, feel the need to highlight it in this podcast specifically because we, as conlangers, often draw inspiration from indigenous languages, and I, myself, have drawn inspiration from the Nishnaabemowin language, also known as Ojibwe, so it seems kind of wrong to take that inspiration and not care about the issues of the actual people who speak those languages. But this is up to you guys as individuals, what you want to do to support this cause. I just want to raise some awareness and let you guys know that I’ll make that small donation. Thank you. Now on to natural languages. Many of us conlangers have a goal of creating a language that at least looks like a natural language, and people do succeed at that in varying degrees. In some ways, it’s not so difficult. There is a reason that ANADEW, A Natlang Already Did it Except Worse, is such a common term in the community. You have to almost deliberately go out to the edge to come up with some grammar or phonology that really looks impossible for humans to come up with naturally. The lexicon can be a bit harder, but with some work, you can avoid relexing and come up with realistic senses for words. What is difficult, and likely impossible, is to come up with the massive amount of variation in language. You can work on dialects and registers all you want, but you won’t really get to the complexity we see in the real world. The reason for that, I’m going to propose, is because in the real world, natlangs have infinite fractal complexity. What do I mean by infinite fractal complexity? Let’s start with your language. For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume a language that is relatively unified and not part of a dialect continuum. That language can naturally be divided into a number of dialects, based either on geography or on social divisions, though most likely both. But those dialect divisions are not hard lines, and there is variation within each dialect. You can subdivide and subdivide until you get to the idiolects of individual people