The Complexity of Natural Languages

In the real world Natlangs have infinite fractal complexity. Every speaker knows thousands of words, and each speaker may have slightly different understandings of their meanings. Words take their own individual journeys, branching out through derivation or hopping across languages in unique patterns reflecting trade routes or migrations. We even have mysterious words that may be from languages that we otherwise know nothing about. In reality, every reconstructed proto-language is really an approximation of a messy collection of different dialects.