German Studies

Articles in this section

• German prefixes and suffixes - an overview

  3 September 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 2 of "The Magic Mountain" - the complete vocabulary

  13 March 2019 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 (...)

• Lexical analysis of "The Magic Mountain": more than 3300 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 (...)

• A German-English literary dictionary (with German-language definitions)

  17 April 2015 by Ray

  The core of this 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, (...)