So ... I picked a book that I had in several languages ... I've got lots ... and Roald Dahl's "The Witches" was the easiest to find amongst the heaps of old junk which populate my house.
I picked a random paragraph, and I counted all the words, worked out how long they were ..all that sort of thing.
So ... here's the results....
No.of letters No. of words Mean word length
Welsh 252 91 2.8
Spanish 322 71 4.54
English 332 79 4.2
French 338 85 3.98
German 451 82 5.5
Well .... quite a difference there !!
Let's remember that this was the same paragraph ... the same information was being conveyed. In Welsh that information was delivered using only 252 letters ... and at the other extreme, in German it took 451 letters to do the same job !
The average word length was an astonishingly small 2.8 (!!!!!) in Welsh, and a whopping 5.5 in German. Even I was surprised.
There's more about this ... for a start, it's based on one paragraph from a book aimed at teenagers .... hardly enough to prove anything very secure ..... but it makes you think .
So .. more on this later ... and now ... Virginia Jetzt ! " Spurlos verschwinden ....