Or the French, for that matter, with ridiculous sentences like "On est arrivés." Grammatically a singular pronoun, but when, semantically, it refers to multiple people, you'll always see the verb in the singular but also usually see the past participle in the plural. AaaAAaagh!
The usage that I don't like is when the British say "France are leading by one goal." No! "Is"!
I believe the actual linguistic shift didn't happen until much later though. Looks like in the mid 19th century "the United States are" was still dominant. And looks like "is" is also in the lead for the United Arab Emirates and the Federated States of Micronesia.
Yeah, my understanding (and I know FR much better than IT) is that (1) that makes regional identity in Italy much stronger, but also, (2) there wasn't a need to construct a pan-French identity in the 19th c. either—and to the extent that it did, it was on more liberal, universalist political lines.
You'll even hear Americans say things like "ethnically French" (not as much since there's less French ancestry here, but still...) and (as I understand) that mental model is even worse for France than for Italy. Like, how did Normans, Alsatians, Bretons, Corsicans (etc etc) get that ethnicity then?
As a noun: un·e Belge, un·e Italien·ne
As an adjective: le gouvernement belge, la cuisine grecque
Part of speech ambiguous, capitalization conventions vary: "Il est belge." or "Il est Belge."
Names of languages: le français, le catalan, l'allemand
Countries: les États-Unis, les Émirats arabes unis
Dan should have written the original post in a language beyond the comprehension of Americans. Like Welsh. Or English. (No wait, that's not quite right.)
When we [Americans] send our people [to the Internet], we're not sending our best. We're sending people that have lots of problems. They're bringing illiteracy, they're bringing rudeness. Some, I assume, are good people.
Me, a barbarian: la bâtardise
You, a connoisseur: la baſtardie
They should use it for the legislative elections if they manage to win the presidency. « Wow ! La majorité présidentielle »
Also that Nintendo/The Pokémon Company have less ability to control the secondary market
Honestly, I find it hard to watch something like this and conclude that it isn't exploitative.
(Now, there are certainly valid distinctions you can draw between this and CS, and I'm not saying this is illegal under NY law or even necessarily that it should be.)
Wow. Everything is computer!
OK, hold right up there. I know you said you didn't want to hear from USians the other day, but why is GB the country code for the entire UK including NI? Is it also used just to refer to the island of Great Britain? Is Northern Ireland being destroyed? Can we start by destroying GB News?
I was looking through some of your posts—you're Norwegian, right? Do people mix up jeg and meg? I did a search and found some results saying people mix them up. I learned some Danish back in the day but never got to a very high level.
Oh yeah, for some reason that didn't spring to mind, but you're totally right, that does exist in (non-standard) American English as well. What's funny is that I feel like you hear it from a lot of well educated people who otherwise speak with totally standard grammar.
That's not something I've heard where I am (Seattle) or in American English generally. But I believe "I's" does exist in Newfoundland English along with "you's" and "we's" (instead of "I am," "you are," "we are"). Definitely takes some getting used to.
Yeah, it's referred to as hypercorrection. Some people learn "Sara and me like to play" in early childhood, and then, in school, learn the prescriptive rule that it should actually be "Sara and I." Then they overgeneralize the rule to objects, not just subjects, as in "Come play with Sara and I."
AI engaging in self-referential performance art! Maybe we have reached AGI
That's totally fair – this account missed the joke entirely. But let's acknowledge it for what it is. It's not a real person. It's a reply bot.
I was just looking at the Élections Québec website to see when Chicoutimi last went for a federalist party, and I only got to 2003 before I got bored and gave up. Some of the other quotes say 1931? Glad someone did the homework.
Don't give him Westminster ideas! He'll start doing a speech from the throne.
Yeah, what I meant was I would assume there are native French-speaking PP/CPC staffers to handle French-language tweets/media, but based on this, maybe not. Amateur hour.
Undocumented immigrants "do not speak English and cannot read even the most basic road signs." For a second, I thought he was going to propose Vienna Convention road signage without so many words, like other countries. Just kidding, everyone knew his answer was going to be racism.
Oh, les immortels (the members of the Academy) are obsessed with le wokisme and did make sure to include it in the 9th ed. of their dictionary in 2024. They did not include la transphobie and only belatedly added l'homophobie. They also forgot to describe a lot of racist & sexist words as péjoratif.
Doubly funny because "supporte" is a relatively uncommon Anglicism for what would better be phrased as "soutient." (Maybe it's more common in Canada, IDK.) This reads like it was written by an Anglophone, which it probably was.
"The boss" is interesting, because it really takes context that isn't available in the sentence itself to know whether it should be chef, cheffe, patron, patronne, boss, caïd.... Not to mention tu vs. vous. Good example of a simple sentence that machine translation is going to struggle with.
Oh yeah, I can relate to that. I speak good French and am more or less a beginner in Portuguese, and I feel like I'm cheating when I basically get 80% of the vocabulary for free. Like, I feel like I shouldn't be able to read the newspaper with a tiny vocab of ~1,500 words, and yet I can.
Similar in French:
- un grand homme = a great man
- un homme grand = a tall man
So a different interpretation of what it means to be big, but the same basic pattern
Yeah, people are constantly exaggerating the mutual intelligibility of Spanish and Italian. Ethnologue puts their lexical similarity at 82%. To put that in context, here's a passage in English with 20% of words replaced with nonsense—and realistically, this is going to understate the difficulty.
