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America was an economic backwater until the 1900s. France was, and to a greatly diminished extent still is, a global power. French has T-V distinction. Frenc

• emodendroket 3y ago
  There are not that many words distinguished only by gender and I don’t think the number of those where it would really be an embarrassing blunder is that great. All languages offer pitfalls like this anyway.
  • tuetuopay 3y ago
    (French here) It’s not really about words distinguished by gender, but misgendering a word will sound very weird to French people. So much so you’ll be labeled as foreign immediately. As crazy as it may seem, but misgendering objects sounds worse than misgendering people (in a purely linguistic way).
    • emodendroket 3y ago
      I mean, of course, but sounding obviously foreign isn't so bad if your meaning can be understood and you haven't accidentally said something with a wildly different meaning than intended.
      • mark38848 3y ago
        People really overestimate the importance of this. If you go to le or la gare doesn't matter much. But if you don't know "gare" in the first place you could have a harder time. Also "embarrassing yourself" doesn't happen because everybody loves it when n-th (for any n > 1) language speakers attempt to speak their language.
• leereeves 3y ago
  The dominance of America really started after WWII, but before that the British Empire spread the English language around the world. If France had won the Seven Years War or the Napoleonic Wars, French would probably still be the global lingua franca, because people didn't choose which language to learn, they learned the language of whichever colonial power controlled their lands.
• freddie_mercury 3y ago
  > America was an economic backwater until the 1900s. The US was the largest economy in the world by 1890. It should be obvious that it wasn't an economic backwater even before that. By 1850 it bigger than Russia, Italy, Spain, Germany, or France. The US stopped being an economy backwater sometime in the early 1800s. Well over a century earlier than your claim.
  • tzs 3y ago
    I'd guess that the size of a country's import/export economy is more important than the size of its total economy when it comes to how much a country will influence language in the rest of the world. Google is refusing to turn up anything useful when I try to find information on when the US became a top importer/exporter.
    • freddie_mercury 3y ago
      The US has always been one of the world's top exporters due to its cotton industry and the cotton boom that started in the 1780s. It is quite likely that the US was a Top 1 or 2 exporter by the time the Constitution was signed in 1789. Remember there were very few manufactured goods yet and not even that much else that was worth importing. By the 1850s US cotton accounted for 77% of the cotton used in Britain, 90% used in France, 60% used in Germany, and 92% used in Russia.
• nerdponx 3y ago
  > America was an economic backwater until the 1900s. That seems like a stretch. My understanding is that plantation cash crops grown in the South like Cotton were a major export in the early-mid 19th Century. And then of course Standard Oil was incorporated in 1870. Maybe the effect of American industrialization didn't have a big effect internationally until the ~1890s and onward, but I'd hardly say the USA was a backwater throughout the industrial revolution.
  • chimeracoder 3y ago
    > Maybe the effect of American industrialization didn't have a big effect internationally until the ~1890s and onward, but I'd hardly say the USA was a backwater throughout the industrial revolution. The US had a huge effect on industrialized Europe before that. The British textile revolution would never have happened if the US hadn't supplied a large chunk of the cotton (from plantations in the South) and if the British hadn't physically destroyed the the-dominant textile industry in India.
• refurb 3y ago
  > America was an economic backwater until the 1900s. The US was the largest economy in the world in 1890. That would suggest it wasn't a backwater until at least the early 1800's.
• oldgradstudent 3y ago
  > The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English. English has more than enough of ways to easily embarrass yourself without the need for arbitrary noun gendering.
  • andruby 3y ago
    Such as? I’m genuinely asking for examples. I’ve embarrassed myself quite often in French, yet haven’t much in English. * neither are my mother tongue
    • akkad33 3y ago
      A couple of examples that come to mind is using the wrong verb form, since English has a lot of irregular verbs, and another is mispronouncing words, since there are many words with the same spelling but different pronunciations. And then you have words like "read", which have both characteristics.
    • adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      The adjective order one is really interesting to explain: the adjectives in "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar. Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!" Many English speakers don't themselves realise it - in the UK, at least, we are not carefully taught English piece by piece after a very young age. Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".
      • FergusArgyll 3y ago
        Steven Pinker's book on irregular verbs has a great example of this. little kids often mess up on irregular verbs ("I eated supper") because they (subconsciously?) learn the grammar, they aren't memorizing the past tense of every word
• tim333 3y ago
  Prior to the 1900s there was the British empire which spread English around a fair bit. >At its height in the 19th and early 20th century, it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, was the foremost global power. (wikipedia) It was said the sun never set on the British empire as it had bits in most time zones which led to a joke from the Indians that it was because God didn't trust the British in the dark.
  • scheme271 3y ago
    Probably the combination of the British empire and subsequent US dominance led to english being established as the language. If you go to places like South Asia, English is pretty well established despite it being no one's native language there. So the British spread it around globally and then the US being a dominant superpower pretty much cemented it's status.
• danmaz74 3y ago
  But the UK was the biggest empire on earth at that time.
• thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English. This... greatly underestimates the number of ways you can make a mistake while speaking a foreign language. If you're a non-Francophone trying to speak French, you have a 100% of making obvious mistakes while you try, and some of those mistakes will probably relate to noun gendering. If you're a non-Anglophone trying to speak English, you have the same - 100% - chance of making obvious mistakes while you try to do that. Depending on what languages you do speak, you may or may not make mistakes in noun gendering. (English noun gendering is a huge problem for Chinese speakers, and boy does it make them sound unnatural.) But that doesn't matter; that's just one way to make a mistake. Your odds of making no mistakes of any kind are zero. Why worry about one particular subclass? You're foreign and everyone who hears you will recognize that.