So here, I’m going to invite you to do something a little strange. I’ve got here an audio recording of Adolf Hitler having a normal conversation (about extraordinary things) with a fancy dude by the name of Mannerheim, during a visit to Mannerheim at the time of his birthday. Wikipedia has the story on the audio recording. Here, it is presented as a YouTube video so you can follow who is speaking, and what is being said.

The reason to listen to this for a few minutes (no need to listen to the whole thing, though if you know anything about WW II, it may become captivating after a while) is because Hitler almost always screamed at his audience, and this is him speaking in a normal voice. I want to pair this audio experience with a linguistic but read experience. After listening to the audio recording with Mannerheim, read through the transcript of Hitler’s only other known “conversational” bit of significance.

There is a recording of that as well. It is a speech but one in which he speaks normally for much of the time. The point here, though, is not to listen to it to get the voice experience (but that is interesting) but to read his words. To hear how he formulates his statements, how he describes his situation. How he aggrandizes himself in the face of failure, how he belittles his enemy. How he schizophrenically moves between the gigantic and the modest, how he moves around his own goal posts as needed to make himself look big league smart.

Below you’ll find the two videos and the text. If either video vanishes (they do sometimes) you can easily relocate one on YouTube

The Mannerheim Recording:

The text of Hitler’s Stalingrad Speech:

If we follow our enemies’ propaganda, then I must say that is to be compared with “Rejoicing towards Heaven, depressed until Death”‘ The slightest success anywhere, and they literally turn somersaults in joy. They have already destroyed us, and then the page turns and again they are cast down and depressed. I did not want to attack in the center, not only because Stalin knew I would. I provide one such example. If you read the Russian telegrams every day since June 22nd, they say the following each day: “Fighting of unimportant character”. Or maybe of important character. “We have shot down three times as many German planes. The amount of sunken tonnage is already greater than the entire naval tonnage, of all the German tonnage from before.” They have so many of us missing that this amounts to more divisions than we can ever muster. But, above all, they are always fighting in the same place. “Here and there”, they say modestly, “after fourteen days we have evacuated the city.” But, in general, since June 22nd they have been fighting in the same place. Always successful, we are constantly being beaten back. And in this continued retreat we have slowly come to the Caucasus.

I should say that for our enemies, and not for your soldiers, that the speed at which our soldiers have now traversed territory is gigantic. And what has transcribed this past year is vast and historically unique. Now, I do not always do things just as others want them done. I consider what the other probably believe and then do the opposite on principle. So, if I did not want to attack in the center, not only because Mr. Stalin probably believed I would, but because I didn’t care about it at all. But I wanted to come to the Volga, to a specific place and a specific city. it happened to have Stalin’s name, but that’s not why I went there. It could have had another name.

But, now this is a very important point. Because from here comes 30 millions tons of traffic, including about nine millions tons of oil shipments. From there the wheat pours in from these enormous territories of the Ukraine and from the Kuban region then to be transported north. From here comes magnesium ore. A gigantic terminal is there and I wanted to take it. But, as you know, we are modest. That is to say that we have it now. Only a few small pockets of resistance are left. Some would say “Why not fight onwards?” Because I don’t want a second Verdun! I would rather hold this with small combat patrols! Time does not matter, no ships are coming up the Volga! That is the important point.

Hitler’s Speech, 8 November, 1942:

Probably not. But it turns out that the reason, if the following video is accurate, is interesting.

I have two questions for the historical linguists in the room. First, is there a name for this rhymification effect? Is is common? Is it confined to certain regions or cultures? Is it linked to Cockney in some way?

OK, that was a lot of questions, but really, all the same question. My second one is simpler: Where does the phrase “Swinging dick” come in? It is a Britishism for, I think, Square Mile money managers and investors. According to something I saw on TV once.

Karl Eccleston and Fiona Pepper are amazingly good actors. The writing is excellent as is the directing. The subtext. THE SUBTEXT IS BRILLIANT.

When I was living with the Efe Pygmies in the Ituri Forest, they would imitate French and English speakers while ranting about specific people who had annoyed or amused them. It was easy to tell which they were doing … French vs. English. But it only sounded like people imitating people, it didn’t sound like the real thing. I remember Sid Caesar doing this as part of his regular routine in several languages, and talking about getting in a cab, say, in Italy, and yelling at the cab driver in fake Italian during the whole ride. Here’s an example. But that isn’t what Eccleston and Pepper did either.

1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by “word” and by “language X”, questions like “how many words are there in language X” are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers.

This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques, and get different measurements for a variety of reasons. The measurements may differ but they still tell me a great deal about the initial question especially when compared with other measurements (like how far away the sun is in comparison).

The way you have worded your paragraph tells me that if I wanted to examine different languages (say, grouped by language family or geography or whatever) to see if there were big difference in lexicon size, it would be impossible. Are you certain you want to make that argument?

In fact, we are mostly in agreement about the difficulties (see below) but that is not the point of the original post. The original post is about an Internet meme that claims that it is all utterly impossible.

2. The same thing applies, with the added issue of what you mean by “know”, to the question of “how many words of language X does a specific person know?” Another layer of variation is added by generalizing the question to “how many words of language X does an average four-year-old or 18-year-old know?” There’s an obvious answer, subject to the usual sampling-error problems, but the result is a bit like asking about average income — the mean value may not be very useful in telling you what you really want to know about the distribution.

I agree that mean values are not especially interesting without understanding variance (though you’ve objected to my quest for variance in item one) but this is not really related to anything I’ve said in my post or comments thereon.

3. Most sensible definitions for (1) and (2) above create serious practical difficulties for counting. That is, they define an answer, but the prescribed process for finding it is hard to carry out, and especially hard to automate in a way that produces an accurate result.

Interesting point, and it fits with what a lot of linguists seem to think of language. I don’t happen to subscribe to the approach that it is all to big and mysterious to study systematically.

4. Extrapolating accurately from samples raises its own special problems here…

I can’t find the place where I scorned this.

5. Despite all these difficulties, researchers over the years have gone through the steps of defining carefully what they mean by “word”, “language”, “know”, etc., and then carried out these steps…

Please seem my comment regarding a room full of beer loving linguists. I don’t think I ever said that defining “word” or “meaning” is easy or something that can be done with precision. What I did imply is that comments such as your number 1 (above) are very serious overstatements of the impossibility of it all, and more specifically, when we see an entry in a dictionary with dozens of meanings listed, we are not really faced with the question: “Is this one word or fifty?” while acknowledging that we may still be faced with the question “is this 32 words or 50?”

6. Comparisons across languages are made more difficult by the fact that the most natural and sensible answers to questions like those in (1) tend to be different in different languages. Furthermore, a decision that may have only a small effect on the results in language X, may turn out to change things by an order of magnitude or more in language Y. Again, this doesn’t make it impossible to answer the questions, it just increases yet again the range of sensible values that answers might have.

Yes, it does increase the range of possible values, and I would add these two points: The degree to which two languages can be compared is very strongly affected by the data collection. Comparing English Lexicon to Central Sudanic languages is impossible because the English dictionaries have hundreds or thousands of authors and centuries of development (if you count the whole written source), while the Central Sudanic language lexicons have between zero and three authors each, decades of study, and were carried out mainly for the purposes of bible translation. (Mostly, zero written lexicon).

Laden is radically impatient with all this talk about how it all depends and it’s hard to tell, but his impatience doesn’t change the facts. Nor does it change the fact that there are plenty of attempts to answer such questions…

Actually, that was not the point of the post. I was speaking specifically of a certain meme on the Internet, not linguistics in general.

Laden seems to be aware of these issues — for example, he found the Nagy and Anderson reference — but his goal in the cited post seems to be to make fun of people rather than to clarify the questions and answers. (He suggests, towards the start of his post, that he wants to evaluate claims about the rate of word learning by children — but I couldn’t see any connection between this issue and the rest of his hyper-kinetic complaining about the difficulty of getting a simple answer to the word-counting question.)

Oh dear, I stepped on your field of study and you got all icky about it. I didn’t “find” the reference. It is part of the literature of which I became aware while studying for my PhD in anthropology. And your statement about my goal is essentially correct. It is not true that my goal is what you later imagined it could have been. I’m not sure how I would have managed to write the post you were expecting!

Mark, I appreciate your comments, but you are mostly constructing and attacking a straw man.

Response to comment by Nick Lamb(here):

I presumed from the fact that almost every other word in the “rant” is made up that he’s very conscious of what the problem is with counting words, and is actually using this opportunity to show the reader why this is all very tricky, but has chosen the form of a rant which pretends to assert the contrary. … Excuse me if that was so obvious that everyone already knows it and I missed some hint that Mark dropped.

Nick: No excuses. It was utterly obvious and some people certainly missed it. Glad you didn’t.

I’d like to add it is probably helpful to understand the commentary in the broader context of the “falsehoods” writing of which it is a small part. My blog is bit dangerous that way: My posts often do not stand alone but require context. To get the context, you click on the tags near the top of the post and read everything.