The Fractal Structure of Language

The Internal Order of Language

English, indeed all languages, is mathematical, and can be treated as such. Indeed, research points to a underlying fractal structure of language, hereto forth unmapped. Using math, we can analyze language at different scales to define its distribution frequency, examine its underlying structure and dissect word formation. There has always been linguistics (the study of language), but it is only in recent years that computers were flexible and powerful enough to go into deeper analysis.

What to we see? Interestingly, recent studies find that language an unspoken internal order. Google DeepMind research postulates that language has a repeating structure, word choice is not independent (what you wrote paragraphs ago still influences what you write now, long past when it statistically should, or make any logical sense), that is also has self similarity, (internal patterns that repeat when there is no reason for them to repeat). Spooky.

So, if we look at this we can compare and contrast what should be true vs. what really happens. If we have a random string of letters, we would logically expect them to have very few words created in sequence. We might get a letter next to a vowel, but, there might be useless nonsense next to the letter-vowel sequence. To illustrate, we might get C-A, but, unless the next letter happens to be one of the handful that forms a real English syllable, the sequence breaks, the next letter will send us back to the beginning of our wait. This is just a sample, if we want a three or four letter word or even more, natural words will be few and far between.

But, of course, letters do not come random, they are naturally distributed in our words unevenly; E occurs more frequently than the letter W. Each letter exists in a weighted form statistically.

What the Tool Does

These tools were made to examine word creation from an English-mimicking string of letter. The pool follows natural letter frequency, so the words that do emerge reflect English’s built-in statistical structure rather than pure chance.

The first tool on this page, keeps it simple, we look for string three or four letter words. To ensure true weighted randomness and analysis we send a request to the API, to generate a 120 character string of letters, analyze for words and filter for meaning. You can see the string generated, the words formed, the most interesting word found, the word family, its origin and an associated writing prompt. This will be generated every morning at six a.m.

Our second tool takes on a harder task, we generate a longer string (not shown), and ask the API to find a longer more complex word. This tool also returns the origin, word family, lineage, and writing prompt. It generates a new word every morning at six a.m. Due to monetary concerns, string and API use is limited and thus not every day will return a long word.

These fun little tools demonstrate the truth of our site, what is beauty, what we consider creative and free, is at its heart mathematical. What we create is bound by rules inborn and unspoken. We are not making music, art, poetry, prose with an eye on the recursive, on similarity, on scaling, but they exist nonetheless.

Both tools are powered by Claude via the Anthropic API. The generated text is parsed in real time to find words in sequence. These are independent GoRhyme tools, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.