Harry Potter's new book in France - a whopping 727 pages.

Depends on what kind of English one is speaking about; for instance, non-literary English, especially when heavy in words of primarily of Germanic origin and not using any more involved expressions and like, can be very concise, but on the other hand, highly literary English can be quite verbose, especially when it involves heavy use of rather involved expressions, grammatical usages and of complex compound words (which are not much different from their German counterparts, except they are generally written with spaces in them). Hence, it is hard to necessarily generalize about the verbosity of *all* English, even though one can speak about such for English usage in a limited context or fashion.

I don't think that words of one origin or another are what necessarily make English concise but the fact that there are so many vocabular options. This richness that allows us to produce minute nuances in meaning is as a result of the diverse linguistic influences. But it's true that Latinates give so much to English by way of the concise terming of abstract ideas allowing clear expressivity in technical fields. Maybe if French was more heavily touched by a secondary language in its earlier evolution it would be more concise.

Hmm, in Chinese, it's just the opposite. The more literary the text, the more concise. The more informal the speech, the more verbose, wordy, and roundabout.

I think it has something to do with Chinese vocabulary: The less words you know, the more "compounding" of descriptions you have to do.

Moreover, in literary Chinese, there's quite a heavy use of allusions, literary idioms, and maxims. So, instead of describing something, someone might simply *hint* at it by using a short allusion or maxim in literary Chinese.