Thought #446 is a rare thing: the same behind-the-scenes story, told word for word in parallel in German, English, Russian and Ukrainian. This language lab lets a small Python script count live – how long are the words, how often do vowels sit next to consonants, which prepositions carry the sentence, and how verbal or nominal does each language sound? Toggle below to compare the 1:1 experiment with the full archive.
English collects the most individual words on Thought #446 – but every German word carries noticeably more letters on average (long compounds like "Russischunterricht"). Russian and Ukrainian get by with noticeably fewer words than German or English: neither language has articles.
How verbal or how nominal does a language sound? This compares the share of verbs and nouns among all words – approximated with a frequency lexicon and suffix heuristics, not a full linguistic part-of-speech tagger.
Ukrainian is known for being especially vowel-rich and euphonic. One reason is "милозвучність" (the euphony rule): the u/v and i/y alternation flips depending on whether the previous word ends in a consonant or a vowel, so two vowels or two consonants never collide.
Russian and Ukrainian tie every preposition to a fixed grammatical case (genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional) – in German and English, word order or just two cases usually do that job instead. The top 8 prepositions per language:
More on the story behind this data: Thought #446 – Behind the Scenes →
