language column

Say Something That Has Never Been Said Before

How often do certain words and phrases appear in language? Marten van der Meulen is fascinated by this question. No, not everything has been said before!

On YouTube, I enjoy watching short clips from the show Game Changer. It’s a kind of game show where comedians have to improvise. The big problem? At the start of each episode, they are not told what the rules are. This leads to hilarious and bizarre moments. Not long ago, I saw a clip where panelists were asked to say something that has never been said before. Reader, that sparked my linguistic curiosity.  

This question is about frequency, about how often certain words and phrases occur. And that just happens to be one of my favorite aspects of language. A large part of my dissertation was dedicated to this topic, I edited a book about it, and I absolutely love it. Frequency plays an important role in language learning, in communication, and in what is easy and difficult. But that’s beside the point. Back to the question.  

At first glance, it might seem difficult to say something truly new and original. After all, each person on Earth continuously produces language throughout the day. This has been happening for tens of thousands of years. Altogether, that’s an unimaginable amount of language. Hasn’t everything already been said by now? 

The answer is no. Absolutely not, never ever, not a chance. There are several reasons for this. First of all, every language has an overwhelmingly vast number of unique words. It’s claimed that Dutch has accumulated a total of sixty million words and word forms since the twelfth century. Many of these are obscure or have fallen out of use. But still, all these words are considered part of the Dutch language. Sixty million words. It would take a lifetime just to produce all of them, and then there is the possibility of endless combinations, repetitions, and much more. I don’t even know how to work out how many combinations that generates, but it’s a lot. Particularly when writing a longer text, such as this column, the number of permutations becomes so overwhelmingly large that it seems almost ridiculous. 

Many of these possible word combinations are meaningless: reads room at fear meat anxious I believe, is unique, but it holds no meaning. Let’s assume you have to say something meaningful and new. Even with that condition, it’s no problem. This has to do with a second reason: we often say nearly the same thing. Much of our language consists of the same words and phrases repeated over and over. Are you coming over for dinner? Let me know. I’m running late. I love you. Yes, right there! And so on and so forth. Then we also have words that are repeated endlessly. Consider the (de). In the newspaper texts of the Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands, this word represents over six percent of all words. Along with the other four most frequent words, the, a, from, in (het, een, van, in), the (de) accounts for almost seventeen percent of all words.  

However, word frequency doesn’t say much about the ability to be creative. Only in exceptional cases do articles appear next to each other. In spoken language, though, you might be surprised to find them together quite often. But that’s a story for another time. As soon as you start putting words together, their frequency drops dramatically. If we look at two-word combinations of the most common articles with the most common nouns, the number quickly decreases. The combination the human (de mens) appears about 125,000 times (out of sixty billion words in total), the year (het jaar) appears 298,000 times, and the subject (het onderwerp) appears 45,000 times. 

Now it gets interesting. Because after an article and a noun, there is usually a verb. That will definitely lead to new combinations.  These three nouns, human, year, and subject, are not found with all verbs. See for yourself: the subject coughs: zero hits. The human kissed: no results. The year forgot: again, nothing. You can do this with just two words too. I personally enjoy coming up with new combinations of adjectives and animal names. Reborn ocelot, honorary Quagga mussel, picky Moray eels. All seemingly unique.  

Clearly, this is somewhat improvised. Could you really investigate whether something has never been said before? How would you even go about doing that? I actually find that quite an interesting question. In fact, I would love to pose these and similar questions to students. This encourages you to think critically about methodology, ethics, creative problem-solving, and the toughest challenge for scientists: feasibility.

All those people who have ever spoken, well, there is no way we can find out. We do have some written sources from the past, but that’s just a fraction of all the language that was produced. And even then, there are many books that we don’t even know existed. This makes it not feasible to investigate. The same is true for all spoken language today, as well as all the books that haven’t been digitized, along with personal texts, letters, shopping lists, graffiti, street signs, and so much more. Wow, it’s crazy to think that, in the end, we are only studying a tiny fraction of all the language out there. 

This brings us to the most fundamental problem in science: how can you ever know if something is true if you haven’t studied everything? This is known as Hempel’s paradox. The simple answer is that we try to take a part of the whole, under the assumption that it is an accurate reflection of the entire whole. This is called sampling, a method used throughout science. However, it’s not without its limitations. In recent years, it has become apparent that the samples used by scientists, including in psychology, were not very reliable. What we thought we knew about the human psyche has suddenly become much more uncertain.  

You could also choose to just go with what you have at hand. In the case of unique language, this means searching the web. My animal descriptions turn out to be unique there too. The phrase the human kissed doesn’t appear. But the subject coughs and the year forgot do show up. So, not unique, even within the limited language we have. Well, with a few extra words, that’s easily fixed. The year forgot the days is unique again (and quite poetic, if I may say so myself). The subject coughs up mucus is less poetic, but it’s vivid and unique.  

We have really delved deep into the nature of science. And all of that because I was watching a comedy clip, lying on the couch, on a dark pre-winter night. Look at that, another unique sentence. 

• dutch language