Would it be so wrong

[james_davis_nicoll]

To try to convince people that Japanese SF novels tend to be shorter than Anglospheric SF novels because Japanese has fewer words than English? And a lot of Japanese consists of words borrowed from other languages.

Comments

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

No no, try telling people it's because Japanese/Chinese characters are more compact than letters.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Which by at least one measure they are. The Japanese for "computronium", for example, is only three characters: 滰算素.

And Japanese paperbacks are half the size of the same books in English. (Okay, I couldn't lay my hands on the English Singularity Sky, but Iron Sunrise is a similar size, as I recall.)