German Studies - Prospero's Isle

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 (...)
Lexical analysis of "The Magic Mountain": more than 3,300 neologisms and an unparalleled number of different words (36,097) !
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
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 (...)
German Literature – a personal survey
9 March 2016 by Ray

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 (...)