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Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/thinking.html
340•nekofneko•4h ago•114 comments

Swift on FreeBSD Preview

https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-on-freebsd-preview/83064
100•glhaynes•2h ago•48 comments

ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

https://www.binnenlandsbestuur.nl/digitaal/internationaal-strafhof-neemt-afscheid-van-microsoft-365
335•vincvinc•2h ago•92 comments

Open Source Implementation of Apple's Private Compute Cloud

https://github.com/openpcc/openpcc
294•adam_gyroscope•1d ago•54 comments

Show HN: TabPFN-2.5 – SOTA foundation model for tabular data

https://priorlabs.ai/technical-reports/tabpfn-2-5-model-report
33•onasta•1h ago•5 comments

The Parallel Search API

https://parallel.ai/blog/introducing-parallel-search
35•lukaslevert•2h ago•14 comments

LLMs Encode How Difficult Problems Are

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18147
17•stansApprentice•1h ago•0 comments

I analyzed the lineups at the most popular nightclubs

https://dev.karltryggvason.com/how-i-analyzed-the-lineups-at-the-worlds-most-popular-nightclubs/
117•kalli•6h ago•60 comments

What if hard work felt easier?

https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/what-if-hard-work-felt-easier
23•kiyanwang•1w ago•5 comments

FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-FBI-Demands-Data-from-Provider-Tucows-11066346.html
427•Projectiboga•3h ago•238 comments

Eating stinging nettles

https://rachel.blog/2018/04/29/eating-stinging-nettles/
129•rzk•7h ago•127 comments

Senior BizOps at Artie (San Francisco)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/artie/jobs/gqANVBc-senior-business-operations
1•tang8330•2h ago

Ratatui – App Showcase

https://ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/
673•AbuAssar•17h ago•189 comments

Benchmarking the Most Reliable Document Parsing API

https://www.tensorlake.ai/blog/benchmarks
12•calavera•1h ago•10 comments

Springs and Bounces in Native CSS

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/linear-timing-function/
37•Bogdanp•1w ago•3 comments

Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/mathematical-exploration-and-discovery-at-scale/
195•nabla9•10h ago•85 comments

Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

https://rawl.rocks/
89•vitaly-pavlenko•1d ago•19 comments

Mark Zuckerberg Had Illegal School at His Palo Alto Compound. Neighbors Revolted

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-school-palo-alto-shut-down/
32•randycupertino•32m ago•13 comments

Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are Trade Barriers

https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-tells-u-s-govt-that-foreign-site-blocking-efforts-are-digital...
253•iamnothere•6h ago•150 comments

How often does Python allocate?

https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/how-often-does-python-allocate/
58•ingve•4d ago•41 comments

Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

https://electrek.co/2025/11/04/australia-has-so-much-solar-that-its-offering-everyone-free-electr...
209•ohjeez•4h ago•161 comments

IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/retail/the-new-smart-home-from-ikea-matter-compatible-251...
211•lemoine0461•6h ago•163 comments

Show HN: qqqa – A fast, stateless LLM-powered assistant for your shell

https://github.com/matisojka/qqqa
87•iagooar•8h ago•73 comments

Supply chain attacks are exploiting our assumptions

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2025/09/24/supply-chain-attacks-are-exploiting-our-assumptions/
23•crescit_eundo•4h ago•9 comments

Pico-100BASE-TX: Bit-Banged 100 MBit/s Ethernet and UDP Framer for RP2040/RP2350

https://github.com/steve-m/Pico-100BASE-TX
67•_Microft•6d ago•11 comments

I may have found a way to spot U.S. at-sea strikes before they're announced

https://old.reddit.com/r/OSINT/comments/1opjjyv/i_may_have_found_a_way_to_spot_us_atsea_strikes/
209•hentrep•15h ago•276 comments

How I am deeply integrating Emacs

https://joshblais.com/blog/how-i-am-deeply-integrating-emacs/
181•signa11•12h ago•123 comments

Phantom in the Light: The story of early spectroscopy

https://chrisdempewolf.com/posts/phantom-in-the-light/
5•dempedempe•1w ago•0 comments

End of Japanese community

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
875•phantomathkg•17h ago•677 comments

Solarpunk is happening in Africa

https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarpunk-is-already-happening
1098•JoiDegn•23h ago•534 comments
Open in hackernews

The English language doesn't exist – it's just French that's badly pronounced

https://www.frenchclasses.com/tablettes-de-chocolat/the-english-language-doesnt-exist-its-just-french-thats-badly-pronounced/
63•detectivestory•2h ago

Comments

coisasdavida•2h ago
well, makes me think of this guy reading labels in french in Canada: https://www.instagram.com/steven.massicotte/
waffletower•2h ago
Oh yeah, say this in French: That jumbo jet's glitchy huddle of passengers found the giggle and fluke of landing to be randomly serendipity-inducing.
wk_end•2h ago
I can barely say that in English, and I'm a native speaker.
cbm-vic-20•2h ago
LMGTFY:

https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fr&text=That%20jumbo%...

projektfu•1h ago
A glitchy huddle of passengers?

I think that glitchy is not used meaningfully. A huddle of glitchy passengers, perhaps, if they are all androids.

sterlind•1h ago
do androids dream of electric airliners?
waffletower•42m ago
They weren't staying in their seats is another more prosaic explanation.
cadr•1h ago
Having Google Translate take that into French and then back gave me "The passengers of this jumbo jet, caught in a quagmire resembling an ocean liner, found a happy accident in this chaotic and surprising landing." I quite like both sentences.
seanhunter•2h ago
This reminds me of the the onion's piece "I bet I can speak Spanish" https://theonion.com/i-bet-i-can-speak-spanish-1819583640/
chrisweekly•2h ago
hahahaha thank you for that, it hit my funny bone just right
b800h•1h ago
If you actually put the sentences in that article into Google translate, it things you're speaking Ilocano, which is apparently a language from the Phillipines.
jandrewrogers•1h ago
Ha, you made me read that article.

Google translate is actually making an eminently reasonable guess. Filipino languages are full of transliterated Spanish loan words. The syllabic structure of the sentences, though it still looks like gibberish to me, also bear more than a passing resemblance to Filipino languages.

ivape•1h ago
My favorite:

I could see if Chinese took a long time to learn. I mean, look at it!

lol.

Onion does an incredible job capturing the absurd essence of an affluent white male.

cestith•2h ago
The syntax has morphed from Germanic languages, but with Norman vocabulary. Norman was a dialect of French from before the standardization of l'Académie Française.
dfawcus•1h ago
Nah - there are two vocabularies, the 'posh' Norman French one, and the common western Germanic one. (There is also an admixture of Norse influence, so the combination of Old English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) with Old Norse then knocking the edges off. That probably did for grammatical gender.)

The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.

cestith•30m ago
Latin and various forms of French are bigger contributors to overall vocabulary than German and Dutch. It does seem to me that much of the core vocabulary day to day or that would be used in a pidgin of English by word use frequency is more Germanic, but I personally don’t know of a study showing that.

And yes, certain situations do tend to favor the Germanic portions to include especially coarser words.

astrobe_•1h ago
Yes, and Norman was a "creole" of a Germanic language brought in by the viking conquest and French, which itself is a creole of a Celtic-based language and Latin (due to the conquest of France by romans). Celts and Vikings were already presents in the British islands. See [1] for the "genealogy" of European languages. So William the Conqueror brought to England more of the same things plus a few more (and the endemic mismatch of spelling and pronunciation I guess).

France is sort-of at the crossroads of Europe, so it's no surprise that there's a little bit of everything in the French language. This is particularly visible in place-names of Normandy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indo-European_language...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_toponymy

vonnik•2h ago
The author is right to critique Cerquiglini. The French legacy is largely lexical. The syntax and the old, short words of English are Germanic. Its several influences drove the relatively large lexicon we have, and probably adapted English to be a globally adaptive language, borrowing words readily.
tsenturk•2h ago
Thanks, mate. If you’ve got other theories like that, I don’t want to hear them either
sterlind•1h ago
it's tongue in cheek. the book is an act of mild trolling.
antisthenes•1h ago
As a person with ears who is mildly versed in English and enough Spanish to get some landscaping done, it's extremely obvious that French is the badly pronounced English, and not vice versa.
weinzierl•2h ago
"English isn’t a dialect of French. The grammatical structure of English is almost entirely Germanic and no amount of sophistry can change that."

It might be seen as a dialect of German but with the heavy influence English had on the German language in the past decades it's more that German is like an English dialect now.

kelipso•2h ago
I wouldn’t say historically a dialect of German. English and German are both Germanic languages, so closely related languages not dialects of either.
weinzierl•1h ago
You are right, of course. My point was more that German nowadays borrows more from English than vice versa. I should not have written "historically" (and have deleted it since), because that is obviously wrong. What I meant to say is that over time the direction of influence switched around.
nkrisc•1h ago
German and English are related, but not that closely. The Germanic language groups are not the same as German the (modern) language.

English is more closely related to Frisian than German.

weinzierl•1h ago
You are right, see my comment to kelipso.
cosmicgadget•2h ago
> The author knows this of course. His point is not to win the argument, but rather to give a new perspective on the traditional rivalry between the English and French languages.

Englandbros - we ride at dawn.

steve_gh•40m ago
I'm thinking about this. I'm sitting on my veranda in my pyjamas having just enjoyed a pukka curry!!
ternus•1h ago
> it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, _a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement_.

Imagine making this claim to a proud French language partisan. You'd have to rush them to the hospital.

littlestymaar•1h ago
Someone would be going to go the the hospital indeed, but it's not necessarily the one you think.
pcrh•1h ago
French was in fact the language of international diplomacy prior to WWII. Russians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, etc, would communicate in French.

English adopted that position after WWII.

jandrewrogers•1h ago
French still is the language of international diplomacy in some (dwindling) circles.
jmclnx•1h ago
One important thing not mentioned. English has no genders except in extremely rare cases. Other Indo-European languages are full of genders, like female tables, male autos, etc.

Trying to learn Spanish in high school, it was genders that confused me the most. Safe to say I just remember some words at this point.

dfawcus•1h ago
English only has sex, not gender. He, She, It.

The commonly cited example of referring to ships as 'she' is simply an affectation, grammatically a ship is an it.

Or can you provide another example I may have overlooked?

adamzwasserman•1h ago
Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.

The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte

It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.

Beef (French: bœuf) / Cow (Germanic) Pork (French: porc) / Pig/Swine (Germanic) Mutton (French: mouton) / Sheep (Germanic) Veal (French: veau) / Calf (Germanic) Venison (French: venaison) / Deer (Germanic) Poultry (French: poulet) / Chicken/Fowl (Germanic) Purchase (French) / Buy (Germanic) Commence (French) / Begin (Germanic) Inquire (French) / Ask (Germanic) Receive (French) / Get (Germanic) Odor (French) / Smell (Germanic) Aroma (French, positive) / Stench (Germanic, negative) Cardiac (French/Latin) / Heart (Germanic) Ocular (French/Latin) / Eye (Germanic) Dental (French/Latin) / Tooth (Germanic)

IncreasePosts•1h ago
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but I've heard a story about the difference in French/Germanic word usage may stem from inequalities from the Norman invasion - the masters were speaking French, and the common folk were doing the dirty work speaking old English derived from germanic languages. So, the masters were dealing with the finished product with French words - beef, pork, mutton, veal, venison, poultry - and the commoners were dealing with animals with Germanic words - cow, pig, sheep, deer, chicken, etc
bioneuralnet•1h ago
I remember the "History of English Podcast" covering a lot of this. I'm more a programming language nerd than spoken language, but I still found it fascinating.

Old English was a Germanic language, later heavily influenced by Norman/French vocabulary. French of course descended from Latin, and Latin and Germanic languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. (The "C" language of humanity, if you will.)

Joel_Mckay•1h ago
It was more that early English commoners had kept a more Germanic dialect, and french was slowly popularized with the aristocracy. =)
nine_k•1h ago
French was forcibly thrust on the population in 1066, but of course the conquerors were the elite, and the defeated, their servants. So if you tend a cow, you call it with the Germanic word: cow, not vache. But if you consume its expensive meat, you name it in French: boef / beef, not rind(fleisch).
Balgair•45m ago
One I'll (badly) remember about English is:

English is the result of Norman soldiers trying to woo Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and for that task was, evidently, effective enough.

guerrilla•1h ago
Germanic* not German.
bbarnett•1h ago
It is absolutely not french anything, but instead, french and english both decend from latin.

English decending from french you say! The nerve! (I assure you, my 6th grade english teacher would correct you thusly)

fooker•1h ago
French had several hundred years of established literary tradition when English was still 'descending'.

Not that it matters, given that we are talking about this in English, which has become the lingua franca in an amusing twist of fate, thanks to the East India Company.

umanwizard•1h ago
Beowulf, the earliest major work of English literature, is from somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. French certainly did not have "several hundred years of established literary tradition" by that time, even if you pick the latter date.
pcrh•1h ago
La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) is dated to between 1129 and 1165. It resembles modern French much more than Beowulf resembles modern English. Few English speakers today could read Beowulf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Roland

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_Roland

signal11•53m ago
This is a great example of moving the goalposts re the original (false) point that a previous comment made about French having a longer literary history than English.

If you’ve got a specific agenda, say x > y, you can be very selective about success criteria to suit yourself.

In this particular case of English and French, the reality is that few modern French speakers can read the Song of Roland. “Resembles x much more” is pretty irrelevant because it cherry-picks similarities while glossing over differences. One can equally say Old English’s “and forgyf us ure gyltas” is pretty readable, but really you’re scraping the bottom of the argument barrel.

Also glossing over an older literary tradition because the language mutated in response to a new political reality (conquest) is ... curious.

reverius42•23m ago
I don't think it's moving the goalposts to say that something understandable by modern French speakers has an older literary tradition than something understandable by modern English speakers. You can call what we speak today "English" but it barely resembles the language used in Beowulf.
pqtyw•59m ago
Well if you count Old English you might as well count Latin for French too.
signal11•1h ago
Heh. English actually has an older written tradition than French.

Not that it’s a competition or anything. But it’s interesting to see people make assumptions about easily-looked-up stuff.

reverius42•25m ago
Old English is pretty unintelligible by modern English speakers though. Middle English much more so, but wasn't that already French-influenced?
hidelooktropic•1h ago
You might want to review the influence of William the conqueror on the English language.
alentred•1h ago
You mean, Guillaume le Conquérant ?
umanwizard•1h ago
English does not descend from Latin. It descends from Old English, a language that is entirely unrelated to Latin besides both being Indo-European, and has been influenced to a substantial degree by Norman French (which does descend from Latin) since the 11th century.

At least that is the conventional view. Apparently, according to this author, it actually descends from French. But that is a very fringe take.

riffraff•1h ago
The author does not actually make this claim, he only does tongue in cheek to show that Norman has a much larger influenced on the evolution of English vocabulary than usually thought.
adamzwasserman•1h ago
The conventional view is that the aristocracy spoke French and the hoi poloi spoke old English.

This is why modern english is a mix.

libraryatnight•1h ago
English was Germanic - we get our Latin influence from Old French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_French_on_English
bbarnett•1h ago
I see the French have been very busy with articles such as this.

Clearly an attempt to take the shine off of "that sub language english" which keeps pestering their ears.

From what I was repeatedly taught by my English, english teacher, all the latin loanwords came from when the Romans were hanging around the Isles. "They left more than walls!", she'd say.

Take care now, lest her ghost rise from the grave to correct your slanders against her beloved english.

tadfisher•1h ago
Careful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved from German, when both languages share a common ancestor as part of the West Germanic family of languages.
adamzwasserman•1h ago
true
pqtyw•1h ago
> English is just as Germanic as German is.

Well yes and no. English generally diverged much more from the common ancestor than pretty much every other Germanic language.

Yeah other examples like Maltese which is technically an Arabic dialect but with half the vocabularies coming from Romance/Italian languages.

nicole_express•40m ago
English has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.
usrnm•1h ago
Modern English is a poor bastard child of a fair Germanic maiden brutally raped by French barbarians
fchollet•1h ago
One interesting observation is that French-derived words in English tend to be fancier -- formal, sophisticated, higher-class -- while Germanic ones tend to be more casual, everyday vocabulary.
euroderf•54m ago
My rough estimate is that words of two syllables or less are mostly Germanic and words of three syllables or more are mostly Romantic.
shagie•49m ago
Many of these words transferred during the Norman Conquest. During that time, England was ruled by French speakers. The upper class and nobility in England were French (and French speakers).

When someone in the upper class wanted boeuf, they wanted the meat of a cow - not the cow itself. And so beef entered the English language as the meat. This extended to other animals. In general, the word for the meat in English is the French word for the animal and the word for the animal is derived from the German word.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/beef and https://www.etymonline.com/word/cow

This also extended to the language law and things that the upper classes (rather than the commoners) dealt with. When the common English (germanic) did have to deal with those topics, they used the French words and those words were brought into English.

bobbylarrybobby•44m ago
I believe this is because the Normans were wealthier than the native Brits
umanwizard•1h ago
English is 0% German other than loanwords like "zeitgeist".

What is more accurate to say is that English and German descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Germanic. Saying English descended from German would be just as wrong as saying German descended from English.

The fact that "German" and "Germanic" sound similar does not mean that they are the same thing, nor that modern standard German is somehow the official representative of the Germanic languages.

adamzwasserman•1h ago
true
madcaptenor•1h ago
IIRC the reason that the family got the name "Germanic" is basically that it was some Germans that came up with the idea. I'm having trouble sourcing this though.
Joel_Mckay•1h ago
Except "German" is an English word for Deutsch

You are welcome, and I will see myself out.. lol =3

Joel_Mckay•1h ago
Don't fall for the divisive trolling... many places teach all three languages as part of the grade school curriculum. French is less concise structurally, German has phoneme that are difficult to pronounce, and English was derived from centuries of merging in countless trading partner pop cultures.

The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

gip•1h ago
The fact is that, for a long time, British kings considered themselves kings of France as well - and even believed that France was the senior kingdom. The language they spoke reflected that attitude.

That said, as a Frenchman who has to speak English every day, I can assure you that English has long since become its own thing!

mytailorisrich•1h ago
They spoke French because they were Normans and married mostly with the continental aristocracy.

Their claim to the French throne was based on the rules of succession and an argument over them (arising from those intertwinned lineages).

An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English.

[1]

gnfargbl•1h ago
Þis gewrit is scræp. Hit is alyfed to awritan fullice riht Englisc butan þæm fule Frenciscan wordum eallunga.
mac3n•1h ago
soþlice!
mrweasel•1h ago
Recently, as my kid is learning to read and write Danish, while I've started to use English more and more, due to work. My observation is that English isn't that great a language, it's just very popular. The more English I speak, read and write, the more I appreciate my own native language.

It's really sad to see English language and words replace native ones, especially if your own language in many cases have better precision and quite frankly reads better. Recently I listened to a "Danish" podcast, about Charlie Kirk. I put Danish in " " because one of the hosts, a native Dane, struggles severely with expressing her thoughts and observation without the use of English.

English is easy to criticize. It doesn't have all the letters it needs. It doesn't have compound noun. A significant part of the vocabulary is just borrow from Norse, German or French (and pronounced wrong). It is however VERY popular, billions speak it, and that's a quality all on it's own.

marcellus23•1h ago
You don't think you prefer Danish because Danish is your native language and English is not?
mrweasel•1h ago
Possibly, but I wonder why so many Danes prefer English words, when we have Danish words that are often more descriptive. My preference have also change over the years, from more heavily favouring English previously, to now opting for Danish whenever possible (e.g. when reading books).
HeinzStuckeIt•1h ago
I wonder if the Nordic languages would be in a healthier state in this respect, in terms of usage and not resorting to English in mixed groups, if their television broadcasting had been shared among each other more, instead of each country looking so much to the USA for programming. The Nordic countries used to be a single linguistic space for educated people and you can still witness this practice among the elderly. Why exactly couldn't young people growing up in, for example, Sweden and Denmark watch and learn from Norway's Uti vår hage just like Americans could watch Monty Python or Fawlty Towers?
mrweasel•1h ago
Norwegian and Swedish seems to be healthier than Danish. I don't have the feeling that Danes generally gives a shit about the health of the language and a decent percentage would probably favour just switching to English entirely.
JuniperMesos•30m ago
There's also the asymmetry that a Danish podcaster felt it necessary to talk about the English-speaking American Charlie Kirk, whereas I struggle to think of a time I've listened to an English-language podcast about a Danish poltical figure.

The popularity of English has little or nothing to do with any facts about how its grammatical system works, and a lot to do with the geopolitical situation of the past few centuries where the UK and then the US were globally important powers.

Night_Thastus•1h ago
And French is just bad Vulgar Latin and Gaulish.

There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language - those concepts are farcical. Every second of every day language evolves with the words and pronunciations of the people currently using it. If enough people spell or pronounce the "wrong" way, it becomes the "right" way.

French today is slightly different than it was yesterday, and the day before, and 50 years ago.

orwin•1h ago
I think we have like 5 words left from Gaul in modern french (only one I know is 'talus'). Old central French was mostly vulgar latin+frankish, with a bit of Gaulish and Arabic, then Gaulish was traded for latin and greek forcibly thanks to the french 'Academie' that made central/Parisian french the only french, and we lost a lot (a _lot_) of words. What's funny is that English, beside Normand french, borrowed a lot from French before that,and we borrowed those words back, with a different meaning, or sometimes a similar one.
bryanlarsen•1h ago
> There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language

There certainly is, in the case of French and other languages that have a central authority defining what is pure and correct.

Defining something as pure by fiat seems nonsensical, but the world is strange that way.

Especially if it applies outside the jurisdiction. Why should the Parisian government get to declare that Quebecois is impure?

umanwizard•5m ago
People massively overstate the power and influence of the Académie française. It is essentially just a cultural organization. Sure, it claims to officially regulate the French language, but its decisions are not actually binding on anyone, not even the government or the education system, and are in fact widely ignored.

In actual practice, French is about as regulated as English is (i.e., not at all) and French people use tons of loanwords from various languages, especially English and Arabic.

UltraSane•1h ago
But it doesn't have grammatical gender which is a HUGE improvement.
comrade1234•2m ago
Grammatical gender lets you be very precise with fewer words. I can say in German with just 4 words both "I am on the hill" and "I am passing over the hill" by just changing the case of one word. It's the same sentence but only one letter changes and it completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

German was designed by a programmer.

Awesomedonut•1h ago
Isn't English a Germanic language though?
beardyw•1h ago
This seems to pay lip service* to Latin which was used in England for a thousand years before the Norman invasion and was still in use up to the 17th century. No, it wasn't used in the pub or the market, but it did influence the language strongly.

* see what I did there

0xbadcafebee•1h ago
This is a linguist troll, by a French linguist. English is West and North Germanic, with Norman French, Latin, and Greek loans. In fact Latin loans are the same amount as French, 28% each.
sidewndr46•1h ago
Just wait until they find out Dutch exists
zkmon•1h ago
None of the languages have their own static existence. Just like a river doesn't have a precise start location and end location, a language doesn't have a precise boundary in space and time. More so in time. Language can't be separated from culture, people and place. All of these - language, culture, people, and places change massively over time, to the extent of losing identity.

If English doesn't exist on its own, French doesn't either. Nor does Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. All of these are incremental variations or dialects of some other language.

mac3n•1h ago
alternatively, Modern English is North Germanic (Scandanavian)

https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/477070.html

https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml

PeterCorless•1h ago
French is actually <30%. There is a well-sourced Wikipedia article about this.

• French (including Old French: 11.66%; Anglo-French: 1.88%; and French: 14.77%): 28.30%;

• Latin (including modern scientific and technical Latin): 28.24%;

• Germanic languages (including Old English, Proto-Germanic and others: 20.13%;

• Old Norse: 1.83%; Middle English: 1.53%; Dutch: 1.07%; excluding Germanic words borrowed from a Romance language): 25%;[a]

• Greek: 5.32%;

• no etymology given: 4.04%;

• derived from proper names: 3.28%; and

• all other languages: less than 1%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in...

Also, one could argue French itself is an agglomeration of Vulgar Latin (87%) as well as its own Frankish Germanic roots (10%), and a few of Gaulish and Breton Celtic origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_German...

umanwizard•25m ago
It is not straightforward to define a metric like this. What counts as an "English word" ? There are books full of the scientific names of plant and animal species, which usually come from Latin; do these count as "English words" ? What's the cutoff?

IMO, a much better metric is frequency-weighted; that is, taking some corpus of real English and counting the words in it, rather than weighting "every English word" with the value 1.

If you do this frequency-weighted analysis, Old English is far ahead of French and Latin combined (especially in colloquial speech; they're closer in formal writing).

ThomasMiconi•1h ago
The book's title is not from Clemenceau, but from Alexandre Dumas, in "Twenty years after" (the sequel to the Three Musketeers).

Fun fact: this passage is somehow excised from the English translation of the book used by Project Gutenberg and Wikisource! (you can see it in the original French version, chapter 68: "l'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé")

prerok•1h ago
I have not read the linguist's essay, just the article, but I am almost certain the claims are preposterous.

The article already mentions that the structure is definitely germanic in origin. Next are the words. Some are adopted from other languages, but many more have roots in Germanic and Latin. The reason is that Romans invaded Britain some 2000 years ago. Afterwards, Latin was spoken in learned circles until the renaissance and even later.

When French became the language of diplomacy, IIRC at the time of Napoleon, only that's when French became a language of note. That's when the "sofisticated" words like veal, venison etc. enter the English language.

But, even all that aside, my native language is Slavic. I speak both English and German, and a very little bit of French. In my limited personal view, German and English have much more in common than French and English.

prerok•32m ago
Reply to self: it seems I was wrong and veal, venison, etc. have roots in Old French, which has influenced Old English through Normandic invasion.

Still, I stand by my assessment: while it's clear that influences are there to some of the words, it's clearly more germanic. Just as we say today that French is a romanic language and English is germanic. I see no evidence here to counter this common classification.

riffraff•1h ago
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

--James D. Nicoll

siraben•1h ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_...
JuniperMesos•25m ago
> Cerquiglini argues that the role of French in the birth of the English language was much deeper than is generally admitted. It is the French influence, he says, that saved English from being just another variant of Dutch. As such it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement.

This sounds like either unfalsifiable bullshit being portrayed as scholarship, or deliberate trolling by a French guy who likes French and wants to mock English-speakers. I'd have more respect for the latter, since at least that's just making fun of a more powerful neighboring culture (a fun pastime for everyone) rather than trying to assert real facts about the world.

mc32•20m ago
They’re just mad they lost the “lingua Franca” of the world title so this is the way for them to hang on to the coattails of relevance. The Normans didn’t even speak Parisian French but a Breton variant and also had with them some Norse words they kept. But they can pretend.

The only thing that made French and English afterwards the lingua francas of the world was the commerce/trade and innovation offered by their speakers.

We could all be using Spanish or Chinese as the lingua Franca if either of them had more influence in the world.

comrade1234•22m ago
I hate (I know, strong word but I really do) French and Latin possessives and French pronunciation. German makes much more sense and thankfully English is a Germanic language.
mc32•18m ago
Danish is even better. More simplified with the exception of integrating the article into the word itself; other than that slightly simpler than English.
gwbas1c•7m ago
The mutual borrowing between both languages is really amusing when visiting Montreal.

I sat down in a restaurant in the historic part of the city, and the menu was loaded with "apostrophe s" and "le Hamburger". I then looked at my server and said, in plain English, "My high school French teacher used to make fun of this as 'franglais'".

The server then laughed and told me, "oh, we mix English into French here all the time and don't care."

The next day I walked by a youth American football league in a city park.

Even my mother's household, which was Quebec-French speaking in the US, would say "poe-tat" instead of "pomme de terre." ("Potato" with a French accent instead of the literal "apple of the earth" word that I learned in school.)