France was, and to a greatly diminished extent still is, a global power.
French has T-V distinction.
French has arbitrary noun gendering.
The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.
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.
Google is refusing to turn up anything useful when I try to find information on when the US became a top importer/exporter.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
English has more than enough of ways to easily embarrass yourself without the need for arbitrary noun gendering.
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
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".
Interesting. As a native English speaker (from the US), I'd say that "good small old" felt a little awkward for me to say out loud. Personally, I'd probably say "good old small ...", but to your point, there isn't exactly a "right" answer, just one that sounds right. I'm assuming you're also a native English speaker from the UK, so maybe we've discovered a funky difference between the English in our two countries. It would be a fun study to give native English speakers a list of those adjectives, and the noun "book", and tell them to order them.
I suppose a comma might disambiguate, within a list of qualities, but I think my point stands.
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
They do, and just like in your other example, they internalize it, they just don't realize they do it automatically because it "sounds good".
> 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".
That's super funny, isn't this taught in middle school or something? In Romania you study Romanian grammar from 5th to 8th grade (11/12 to 14/15), and you learn syntax, morphology, etc.
Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-)
Yes.
Furthermore, I didn't know the English word for it, despite being a native speaker, but do know the German "Verben mit Präpositional-Ergänzung", from having learnt German.
Speakers of English as a foreign language will know more about English grammar than English native speakers.
The brain will remember the term while it’s useful — to get a good grade on a test. After that, for most (almost all?) people it is useless to remember.
Phrasal verbs are not typically mentioned when Norwegian kids learn English, because not only do we have them, we typically use them in exactly the same way (e.g "eat up" is the same as "spis opp", "find out" is the same as "finne ut"). No reason to explain an obscure and odd concept if kids do the right thing by default anyway.
"Modal particles", small words that subtly indicate the speaker's certainty or degree of concern, likewise is another strange little grammatical quirk that German has, but Norwegian kids generally don't need a name for since Norwegian has them too and they can mostly just be translated directly.
As a foreigner that observed a lot of other foreigners speaking English: it is not an easy language to master.
Let me go take a sheet.
I really like that beach.
But I don't think English particularly stands out, and I can think of languages that are much worse than it in that regard (especially for an outsider). Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese / French / Korean are all pretty notorious examples for homophone collisions.
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.
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.