German Studies

Articles in this section

• German prefixes and suffixes - an overview

  15 November 2020 by Ray

  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 (...)

• The astonishing vocabulary of Thomas Mann’s "The Magic Mountain"

  22 November 2018 by Ray

  Readers of Thomas Mann’s great opus The Magic Mountain (1924) cannot fail to be impressed with the tremendous range of the vocabulary in this masterful evocation of a pre-WW1 world on the brink of a global catastrophe.
  One striking aspect of the vocabulary in this work — its quite amazing number (...)

• Lexical analysis of "The Magic Mountain": more than 3,300 neologisms and undefined words!

  20 November 2018 by Ray

  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 (...)

• The average number of meanings per word in German (and maybe English too)

  27 August 2017 by Ray

  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 (...)

• Why we think that German has a bigger vocabulary than English (or any other Indo-European language)

  18 November 2016 by Ray

  While it is generally 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 (...)