Hans Arens

This article deals with the literary and linguist Hans Arens. For the writer and publisher of a similar name, see Hanns Arens .

Hans (Karl Wilhelm) Arens (born January 31, 1911 in Cologne ; † January 12, 2003 in Bad Hersfeld ) was a German literary and linguist and teacher .

Life

After graduating from high school in Berlin (1929), Arens studied German, English and Romance studies (also in Berlin), and obtained his doctorate in 1939. phil., passed the state examination in Marburg in 1947, the pedagogical examination there in 1950 and became a grammar school teacher in Bad Hersfeld in 1953, director of studies in 1974, retired from 1976, 1987 Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon.

In addition to his school duties, Hans Arens found time to work on a number of literary and linguistic publications. Probably his best-known work is Linguistics (1955, 2nd edition 1969, paperback edition in 2 volumes 1974), in which he presents the history of linguistics through excerpts from excerpts from important authors. He is a pioneering author for quantitative linguistics and quantitative literary studies , in that he advocates the statistical evaluation of texts and also makes this effort himself.

He later discovered what is known as Arens' law : the longer the sentences in a text, the longer its words. Altmann (1983) has shown that Arens' law is a consequence of Menzerath's law .

Works

• Linguistics. The course of their development from antiquity to the present. 1955; Second, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1969 (as paperback: Fischer Athenäum Taschenbücher, Frankfurt / Main 1974, volume I: ISBN 3-8072-2077-1 ; volume II: ISBN 3-8072-2078-X ).
• Analysis of a sentence by Thomas Mann. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1964.
• Hidden order: the relationship between sentence length and word length in German narrative prose from the Baroque to the present day. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1965.
• Duden today. In: Duden. Commemorative publication for his 150th birthday on January 3, 1979 . Published by the city of Hersfeld. Hoehl-Druck, Bad Hersfeld without the year (probably 1979), (no ISBN.).
• Commentary on Goethe's Faust I. Winter, Heidelberg 1982. ISBN 3-533-03183-7 .
• Aristotle's Theory of Language and its Tradition: Texts from 500 to 1750. Selection, Translation and Commentary. Benjamin, Amsterdam 1984. ISBN 90-272-4511-8 .
• Commentary on Goethe's Faust II. Winter, Heidelberg 1989. ISBN 3-533-04092-5 .
• E. Marlitt: a critical appreciation. Scientific publishing house Trier, Trier 1994. ISBN 3-88476-058-0 .

See also

• Menzerath's law

literature

• Gabriel Altmann : H. Arens' "Hidden Order" and Menzerath's Law. In: Manfred Faust, Roland Harweg, Werner Lehfeldt, Götz Wienold (eds.): General linguistics, language typology and text linguistics. Festschrift for Peter Hartmann. Narr, Tübingen 1983, ISBN 3-87808-215-0 , pages 31-39.
• Karl-Heinz Best : Hans Arens (1911-2003) In: Glottometrics 13, 2006, pages 75-79 (PDF full text ). (Reprinted in: Karl-Heinz Best (Ed.): Studies on the history of quantitative linguistics. Volume 1. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2015, pages 1-6. ISBN 978-3-942303-30-9 . On the Internet: http : //www.glottopedia.de/index.php/Hans_Arens .)
• Peter Grzybek, Ernst Stadlober: Do we have problems with Arens' law? A new look at the sentence-word relation . In: Peter Grzybek, Reinhard Köhler (editors): Exact Methods in the Study of Language and Text. Dedicated to Gabriel Altmann on the occasion of his 75th birthday . Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York, pages 205-217. ISBN 978-3-11-019354-1 . [Quantitative Linguistics; 62]

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Arens in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See also: Irene M. Cramer: Das Menzerathsche law . In: Reinhard Köhler , Gabriel Altmann, Rajmund G. Piotrowski (eds.), Quantitative Linguistics - Quantitative Linguistics. An international manual . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, pp. 659–688, on Arens law: pp. 676f. ISBN 3-11-015578-8 .