"The memorandum of Trump’s call with Zelensky appears remarkably different in speed and content from the full transcripts of calls between President Trump and foreign leaders..."

"The transcript of a 24-minute call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in which both the participants spoke English, included roughly 3,200 words, or about 133 words per minute. A 53-minute call with then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in which both Trump and the Mexican president spoke through interpreters, included roughly 5,500 words, or about 102 words per minute. The White House summary of Trump’s 30-minute call with Zelensky — which included interpreters because Zelensky spoke Ukrainian while Trump spoke English — includes fewer than 2,000 words, or roughly 65 words per minute. That suggests that the rough transcript of the Zelensky call includes about half the number of words that would be expected if the call had proceeded at the same or similar pace as the previous calls."

From "Odd markings, ellipses fuel doubts about the rough transcript of Trump’s Ukraine call" (WaPo).

This attack on the transcript makes me think of something Trump said in his press conference yesterday (which I listened to, in full, twice as we drove 1,000 miles yesterday and overnight):

I thought that I would finish off the first term without the threat of people making false claims, but this one turned out to be incredible. All because they didn’t know that I had a transcript done by very, very talented people — word for word, comma for comma. Done by people that do it for a living. We had an exact transcript. And when we produced that transcript, they died.

When we produced that transcript, they died. That is, they were set to plunge into impeachment based on the whistleblower's complaint, and then Trump surprised them with the transcript. Now, they have to go forward on the transcript... unless they can delegitimatize the transcript. So, we're hearing of "odd markings," and there's a dispute about the meaning of ellipsis marks: Are there omitted words or is this the standard way to indicate an incompleted sentence, a shift midthought?

If the words per minute rate with the Ukrainian president was so much slower than with the Mexican president, it's some evidence that we're not getting all the words, but there are obviously other explanations: There might be an easier, more fluent relationship with Mexico; the Mexican president may be a much faster talker than the Ukrainian newcomer" the Spanish/English translators might work faster than the translators on the Zelensky call. What language was that? According to Wikipedia:

According to [Zelensky's wife] she and her husband grew up in an overtly and predominantly Russian-speaking environment and had no relatives who spoke Ukrainian, except for ones who used Surzhyk, a sociolect of Ukrainian and Russian.... She... told the BBC that she and her husband can freely communicate in Ukrainian, especially when he is not "influenced by stress and psychological pressure," but that her husband was still "trying to deepen his knowledge" of the Ukrainian language.

Certainly, speaking with the U.S. President would be "influenced by stress and psychological pressure," so if he were speaking Ukrainian, he might indeed have experienced some difficulty that would affect his words per minute.

I'm enjoying the minutiae of interpreting this tiny evidence about words and punctuation. It's right in my zone, the kind of thing I'm very comfortable uploading into my head and musing about. But I think I'm not typical and suspect that most Americans — unless they're hellbent on getting Trump — will view this dispute as hopelessly into the the weeds. Trump probably sees that and will call everybody out into the sunlight where we don't have to worry about that fussy nonsense which is all the Dems have after they "died" when he surprised them with the transcript.

By the way, here's the poster for "Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon," a 2012 Russian comedy movie (which, per Wikipedia, was a sequel to "Hitler goes Kaput!"). That's Volodymyr Zelensky in the role of Napoleon:



ADDED: I published this post without understanding what "odd markings" referred to. That is, even I, with an interest in picayune evidence and specifically wanting to know what were the "odd markings," wrote a post and was done with it without getting to the part that explained "odd markings." This makes me think that precious few people will get this far, but I did go back and track down the answer:

The record of the presidential call with Zelensky, which is labeled “MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION,” was marked as having been produced by note-takers in the White House Situation Room, as is standard for calls with foreign leaders. The record, however, is unusual for lacking a tracking number that would normally indicate it had been circulated to senior subject experts and the national security adviser’s office for review and edits. Instead of a “package” number, the memo released by the White House carries a stamp saying: “PkgNumberShort.”

The document additionally carries classification markings that Situation Room staffers do not normally add when they create a word-for-word transcript, current and former officials said.

“I thought to myself, ‘This didn’t go through the normal process,’ ” said one former government official who was among several who handled these records and found the document released by the White House curious....