[pfedor]

I find such comparisons misleading. The differences between natural languages are not at all the same thing as the differences between programming languages. All natural languages have the same expressive power, or at least very close. The existence of the phenomenon of translation proves it. You can take a book in Classical Latin (according to my friend's girlfriend who is a linguist, a very terse language) and its translation into German (typically given as an example of a very verbose language) and the difference in length will be maybe 30% (and frankly, I don't even believe this difference can be accounted for by the greater expressive power of Latin; my guess is it's just that German words are longer on average.)