The English language doesn't exist – it's just French that's badly pronounced
53 comments
·November 6, 2025adamzwasserman
usrnm
Modern English is a poor bastard child of a fair Germanic maiden brutally raped by French barbarians
tadfisher
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.
bbarnett
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
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 on English, thanks to the East India Company.
hidelooktropic
You might want to review the influence of William the conqueror on the English language.
umanwizard
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 Normal 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.
bioneuralnet
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.
guerrilla
Germanic* not German.
IncreasePosts
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
Night_Thastus
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.
zkmon
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.
seanhunter
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
hahahaha thank you for that, it hit my funny bone just right
b800h
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.
ternus
> 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
Someone would be going to go the the hospital indeed, but it's not necessarily the one you think.
tsenturk
Thanks, mate. If you’ve got other theories like that, I don’t want to hear them either
sterlind
it's tongue in cheek. the book is an act of mild trolling.
beardyw
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
gnfargbl
Þis gewrit is scræp. Hit is alyfed to awritan fullice riht Englisc butan þæm fule Frenciscan wordum eallunga.
mac3n
soþlice!
waffletower
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.
cadr
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.
projektfu
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
do androids dream of electric airliners?
wk_end
I can barely say that in English, and I'm a native speaker.
gip
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!
cestith
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.
astrobe_
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...
dfawcus
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.
null
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)