Alex Reuneker

Christmas day! Frits woke up a quarter to eight and 'his first thought was: "It is Christmas Day."' I must admit that my first thought was of coffee.

Today's chapter of The Evenings hosts almost 7.000 words (6993 to be precise), of which 1585 are different. That means the chapter has a type-token-ratio of 0.23, and the mean word length of 4 letters, both (dated) indicators of readability. As I worked on an online implementation of the so-called Hirsch-Popescu Point recently (see https://www.reuneker.nl/2025/12/hirsch-popescu-point-added-to-lexical-diversity-calculator), I thought it would be fun to see where that point, at which the frequency of a word matches its position in a sorted distribution table, lies in this chapter.

The Hirsch-Popescu Point (red) in chapter 4 of The Evenings.

Using the Lexical Diversity Calculator, it turns out the Hirsch-Popescu Point is 32: the word no occurs 32 times, and is the 32nd word in the word distribution. Going back to the text, we encounter it early on, right after Frits' initial thought of it being Christmas Day actually: 'On the window he saw no frost flowers.'

Have fun reading on this Christmas Day, and have a nice Christmas of course!

It's already the third day of reading The Evenings, and I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday. Baldness is a recurring theme throughout the book – an early sign of mortality, and I found it interesting to see how Frits expressed his gnarly remarks on his brother 'getting extremely bald'. Yes, in English too, it sounds both astonishingly direct and funny.

Today, I'm reading chapter 3, and I thought I would extract keywords from that chapter using the tool available at https://www.reuneker.nl/files/keyword. Now, to index keywords, you need a reference corpus, because otherwise, you'd just get the most frequent words, which, in almost all cases, are 'just' grammatical words like the, a, he et cetera. Indeed, looking at the top 3 below, you immediately see what I mean.

Most frequent words in chapter 3 of The Evenings

In the keyword tool mentioned, you can select the British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference. That isn't perfect, because it doesn't match genre (newspapers vs literature) nor period, but as, again, it's just for fun, let's not get to picky about that. Pasting the third chapter into the tool and pressing 'extract keywords' gives the following results.

Keywords in chapter 3 of The Evenings

So yes, Dutch names are significantly more frequent in The Evenings than in the BNC. Not that surprising, of course, but if we glance over the names, we see words like said, which makes sense, because Frits talks a lot, and not only to himself. I was surprised to also see wortel (carrot) in the list, but this too is a name, introduced in a proto-bond like 'My name is Wortel. Arend Wortel.'

Again, these little test are just for fun. One chapter is a bit short to do a keyword analysis on, the reference corpus isn't perfect, and there are technical details concerning apostrophes and the like to deal with, but a brief quantitative look at a chapter just gives a nice and different little insight into a text many know so well.

Have fun reading today!

Today, we're reading chapter 2 of The Evenings. I thought it would be fun to look at sentence lengths in that chapter and compare them between the original Dutch text and the English translation. There's no reason to expect a real difference – it's simply for fun.

First, the Dutch text. pasting the chapter into the sentence-length calculator at https://www.reuneker.nl/files/senlen tells us that there are 650 sentences, with a total number of 6720 words, and an average of 10.34 words per sentence (sd = 6.28). For the English translation, there were 3 sentences more (653), with a total number of 7135 words, and an average of 10.93 words per sentence (sd = 6.81). We already see that these numbers are very similar, but let's test for a difference anyway to see if there's something interesting to be learned.

Using the t-test calculator at https://www.reuneker.nl/files/t we get the following results. For De avonden (n=650), the sum total of words is 6720, the minimum number of words in a sentence is 2, the maximum is 40, the mean is 10.34, the median is 9 words, and the standard deviation is 6.28 words. For The Evenings (n=653), the sum total of words is 7135, the minimum number of words in a sentence is 2, the maximum is 44, the mean is 10.93, the median is 9 and standard deviation is 6.81. The difference in sentence lengths between The Evenings and De avonden is not significant (t (1301) = 1.62; p >= 0.05). The effect is negligible (Cohen's d = 0.09; Cohen, 1988). In a boxplot, that looks like this – indeed, nearly identical.

Sentence lengths in De avonden and The Evenings

So, which sentences are those very long ones, then? And are they the same sentences across both editions? The answer is yes, as you can see below.

Dutch Op de trap, bij de kaartencontrole, troffen ze elkaar weer en liepen langs een spandoek met het opschrift Berends gymnasium, 1926-1946 naar boven, waar ze in een hal, kleiner dan die beneden, voor de ingang van een zaal kwamen.

English At the foot of the stairs, where the ticket takers stood, they met up again and climbed past a banner reading Berends Gymnasium, 1926-1946 and then, in a hall even smaller than the one below, found themselves before the entrance to an auditorium.