Comment on "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym

• AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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

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  • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Neat, I stand corrected.

    I doubt the french history teacher I had who taught me that is still alive though.

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• birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This comment belongs right in a badling sublemmy.

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