German Studies

The German language has a large number of prefixes and suffixes whose function is to enable the formation of an open-ended number of new words by adding new nuances, aspects and dimensions to other words.
These powerful tools can be added in front of or behind just about anything to create new, usually particularly precise and expressive terms that are so numerous that only a small sub-section of these terms are ever included in the dictionaries – there just isn’t room for all the possible (…)

Thomas Mann’s monumental (308,000 words, 984 pages) The Magic Mountain is to German literature what “Don Quixote” is to Spanish literature, what "War and Piece" is to Russian literature, and what "À la recherche du temps perdu" is to French literature – a reference and a model that remains at the top of the most illustrious literary works ever produced in the language.
The reader of this seminal work is immediately struck by the extensiveness and expressiveness of the vast vocabulary used (…)

While it is widely considered that the almost-universal language of Shakespeare and Bob Dylan has the largest number of words of any Indo-European language – languages of agglutinative language-families, such as Japanese, Turkish and Hungarian, which by construction attach many suffixes to a root as the meaning of a phrase evolves, cannot be compared to Indo-European languages in lexical terms – it seems obvious to us that this distinction rather belongs to the language of Goethe and Thomas (…)

You will find in this compilation of works a reasonably comprehensive, albeit necessarily incomplete, sampling of the outstanding German-language short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels and plays that have been written by German, Austrian and Swiss authors over the past several hundred years. No. Date Author________ German Title English_Title_______ Genre Synopsis/Commentary__________________________________________ 1 1668 Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelschausen Der Abenteuerliche (…)

Based on a study of the evolving number of words in the successive editions of our German-English Literary Dictionary, we can safely venture to say that, for German :
– there are about 2 meanings per word on average for the 10,000 or so most commonly-used words (such as those listed in the initial version of our dictionary) ;
– there are 1.6 meanings per word when the word-population is expanded to 30,000 or so widely-used terms, such as those in the latest version of the dictionary ; (…)

The core of this 34,000-word bilingual literary dictionary consists of all of the words looked up in various dictionaries while working through some 60-odd German-language novels and short-story anthologies, as well as all of the commonly-used nouns and adjectives and all of the prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, pronouns and articles.
For each separate meaning of an entry-word we have included, in addition to its English translation, the original German-language definition and (…)

Mark Twain concluded this very entertaining overview of the German language with the statement : "... a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years."
His reflections on the particularities of the language of Goethe, and his suggestions for reform – a most topical subject – make very good reading indeed.
Recommended for germanophiles and germanophobes alike ! An e-book is available for (…)