I decided to look into this because I was curious.
The unification and regulation of the French language came about in 1653 with the founding of the Académie Française and it actually took a while for the revolutionaries to pivot from “liberty of language” to “the only language in France should be French” English was already established by this time and the vowel shift was basically complete.
According to Wikipedia, Middle French died out in the 17th century while Middle English died out in the 15th. Ergo: Modern English predates Modern French
If we check back farther it seems the two languages developed similarly though the arbitrary divides for each age of language (old, middle, modern) seem to show with English being first by roughly a century.
Of course this is all arbitrary since language doesn’t evolve discretely. However the Wikipedia entries for the oldest Gallo-Romance (precursor to French) is from 842CE, whereas old English poetry dates as early as 650-700CE. Once again suggesting English predates French.
Now there is a difficulty here with French because it originates from Vulgar Latin which could be considered older than English, but I’m not sure many would call it French since lots of European languages branched from Vulgar Latin
Japanese sentences (clauses) end with the verb. In Kiswahili/Shimaore a noun is followed by its possessive pronoun (“cup my”, “spirit their”…). Languages are very diverse in that regard
The French and acronyms. You got NATO, but the French translate it so they call it OTAN. Directly translated, they also just say the ‘States United’.
Anyone’s guess who did word order first to find out why French is a silly language.
French predates English.
Also, bold calling a language silly in english
This comment belongs right in a badling sublemmy.
I decided to look into this because I was curious.
The unification and regulation of the French language came about in 1653 with the founding of the Académie Française and it actually took a while for the revolutionaries to pivot from “liberty of language” to “the only language in France should be French” English was already established by this time and the vowel shift was basically complete.
According to Wikipedia, Middle French died out in the 17th century while Middle English died out in the 15th. Ergo: Modern English predates Modern French
If we check back farther it seems the two languages developed similarly though the arbitrary divides for each age of language (old, middle, modern) seem to show with English being first by roughly a century.
Of course this is all arbitrary since language doesn’t evolve discretely. However the Wikipedia entries for the oldest Gallo-Romance (precursor to French) is from 842CE, whereas old English poetry dates as early as 650-700CE. Once again suggesting English predates French.
Now there is a difficulty here with French because it originates from Vulgar Latin which could be considered older than English, but I’m not sure many would call it French since lots of European languages branched from Vulgar Latin
As for silliness… yeah no arguments there lol
Neat, I stand corrected.
I doubt the french history teacher I had who taught me that is still alive though.
Japanese sentences (clauses) end with the verb. In Kiswahili/Shimaore a noun is followed by its possessive pronoun (“cup my”, “spirit their”…). Languages are very diverse in that regard
To be fair the same happens in Spanish with most acronyms
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