Essays

Articles in this section

• English is a wordy language!

  1 December 2021 by Ray

  We have compared the word-counts of the considerable number of translations into English from other languages on our site – 392 at latest count – with the following results:
  - ALL OF THE TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN TEXTS HAVE WITHOUT EXCEPTION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORDS THAN (...)

• The Great Baseball Scandal - how the Mob won the 1919 World Series, by Nelson Algren

  29 April 2020 by Nelson Algren

  Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the (...)

• A comparative study of the vocabulary of the greatest Western authors - and the winner is . . .

  13 March 2019 by Ray

  With the help of modern technology and a clever engineering student, we have analysed in depth the vocabulary in 25 of the most famous one-volume works in the history of Western literature - celebrated texts by Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, (...)

• 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 2014 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 (...)