Really proud as a French, I think the government has had some success with moving to something matrix based for the public sector too.
https://tchap.numerique.gouv.fr
I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
It's not completely wrong, it will be understood, but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order ('a big tasty sandwich' sounds more natural to a native speaker than 'a tasty big sandwich', even though the latter makes sense and will be understood).
Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.
Edit: A sibling comment pointed out that 'an American' is grammatical, and thinking about it, I think the suffix -an is what makes bare demonyms grammatical - you can say 'an Angolan', 'a Laotian', 'a Peruvian', 'a Moroccan', etc, but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese', etc.
> but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native
You mean a native speaker might be ungrammatical when using their non-native language? That makes sense to me.
> Spain has 'Spaniard'.
Even so, you'll hear a ton of native Spanish people saying "As a Spanish person" or "As person from Spain" instead of simply "As a Spaniard", I'm not sure this is very surprising. If anything, that mistake makes it more likely they're a native than not, in the case of Spain, as the level of English outside of metropolitan areas is lacking at best, compared to other European countries.
I'm using the words 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' in a linguistic sense; human languages are subtle and fluid, and one doesn't have to be far along the sliding scale between 'doesn't speak a word' and 'well-educated native speaker' to be understood. We speak of 'broken' English when somebody is able to be understood but hasn't fully grasped the language yet; using demonyms incorrectly is a subtler flavor of the same thing. For example 'no come here' -> 'no entering' -> 'no entry'
> but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese'
You also don't say 'a Japanese' but that is an extremely common error with Japanese English speakers when they are first learning.
I am looking for a citation, but I seem to recall the casual rule of thumb is something to do with the ending of the nationality (so '-ish', '-ese','-ch' etc. you can't put 'a' in front). I think the more formal explanation likely centers around rules relating to indefinite articles.
> and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order
I would think that if you say you are French, then everyone know you aren't native anyway. Maybe it's actually a good way, it can distinguish between true natives and false natives
When speaking English, the French side of my family refers to themselves like that often, however, they're from Bretagne, so exactly how French they are is up for debate.
Technically yes the demonym is "French", but "I'm a French" just doesn't work in English. The word 'French' is almost exclusively used in English as an adjective or the name of the language. It is never used as a noun for anything else. So in context, it reads as an adjective without a paired noun.
In English, you have to disambiguate be adding a noun: French person, French citizen, or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.
Similarly, we don't call people "a Chinese". That construction is considered derogatory, if not outright racist. Demonyms typically cannot be used as nouns alone without a suffix. "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.
As usual for English, the rules are vague and inconsistent.
No, Frenchman is fine. It's a neutral and common descriptor, and I've far more often heard it said by French people than about them. Similar to Spaniard.
Not everything needs to be perennially problematised.
It is wrong, in the sense that native speakers do not say that, and it triggers what linguists call a "grammaticality judgment" in a native speaker. Same as "He eat apple" or "I am go to school". These may be comprehensible utterances, but they do not fit into a native speaker's internal grammar of valid English sentence structures.
Yes, languages can change, but there is no evidence that native speakers have started saying "a French". The only context I've ever seen that in is "As a French...", which strongly implies a non-native speaker of English. The evidence suggests that it's a common language interference error from French, not some future development of English.
Demonyms don’t use the same rules as countable nouns. Both “French” and “British” are acceptable demonyms, they’re just not particularly idiomatic in American English (which likes to overcorrect with “person” like you’ve noted).
(There’s no particularly consistency with this, it’s just what sounds “good” to American ears. We’re perfectly fine with “as a German” or “as a Lithuanian.”)
Precisely so: the OED's role is descriptive, in that it is to describe English as it is used, not how it ought to be used. It provides evidence of a grammatical rule - it is not the rule itself.
You can speak however you like, there is no language police, but the fact is the average English speaker will perceive certain constructs to be grammatically incorrect. "He eat", "I driving", "a French" etc.
If you're going to make statements like that to go against what I've written then at least come up with some viable citations to grammar literature.
Honestly, in all my years on this earth I have never, ever heard anybody in any English speaking country I've spent time in say "a French" "a American" "a British".
And that amounts to a lot of time surrounded by people speaking VERY "casual" English.
P.S. I said "an American" was ok if you re-read.. an NOT a
The reason you can say "an American" has nothing to do with a vowel or not, there are just some demonyms that for some reason can be used like this, and some that can't.
But your explanation about why it is correct is bullshit, has nothing to do with "an" vs "a", the English language is just inconsistent as fuck and some demonyms can be used like this and some can't.
> Pedantry attracts dislike. One may be right to state something, yet wrong to call it out in public.
Ironically most French people I know would be perfectly receptive and happy to receive corrections in grammar, English or otherwise.
The French tend to be particularly pedantic about the teaching of their own grammar. Most native French speakers are quite used to being swiftly and firmly corrected on grammar from an early age.
there is a time and place for everything. "Les règles de bienséance" matter more to me than the safekeeping of the exactness of English grammar, which as others have been keen to point out is hardly as strict as you seem to imply.
And no, no French person likes to receive corrections in grammar. Giving lectures on proper english grammar/pronounciation is generally a mark of (classist) pedantry since speaking proper english is generally the preserve of those lucky few that have had the opportunity of spending time in the Anglosphere, a tiny minority of the french population in fact, who are always eager to put their one upmanship on display, in a very crude, almost vulgar fashion.
I have been travelling through Japan for the past week, the grammatical and orthographical error would likely give you a nosebleed. Meanwhile, I just smile and move on, I got the meaning, it is what matters. Same for the OP.
I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been in France and had people correct my pronunciation (which btw, it’s really not so bad — the best complement I got was that they could tell I was foreign, but not sure where from).
I'm not sure how happy they actually are about it though.
I think most people have a bit of Stockholm-syndrome relationship with it, the highest tier of argument refutation in France might honestly be grammar-based :P
I would think of using 'Frenchie' to refer to a person as being affectionate banter. Like 'Yank' for Americans or 'Canuck' for Canadians. It's not incorrect, but would be inappropriate outside of an informal context.
French people have 'rosbif' to refer to the English and Australians have 'pom' or 'pommie'. You wouldn't call the prime minister that at a diplomatic event, but it's not offensive to call your friends that.
> I would think of using 'Frenchie' to refer to a person as being affectionate banter
Not sure about other English-speaking countries but I'm fairly sure we don't use that word in England. It's exclusively the dog. We usually call them a frog which is quite derogatory, or use a certain tone when saying e.g. "he's French" (implying "ugh"). We also don't call Canadians Canucks but certainly call USAians we dislike Yanks
We English don't really do affectionate banter with the French. We either like/admire them or hate them lol
I mostly admire them, for the record (but it can be testing at times – we find their arrogance quite annoying ;)
In what world is this kind of things a necessary evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27état , I'm not convinced that any of the large scale interventionist conflict the US got involved into after WWII had a positive outcome.
Senseless foreign inference and cruelty didn't just come about with the Trump admin.
So should we really applaud selling shiny new toys that will enable more baseless cruelty? Probably not.
Just like we shouldn't support political terrorism.
Will this really do any good when this kind of legislation magically appears through lobbyists simultaneously across the West? Let's not forget that blocks like the EU also have significant bullying power via trade policy.
But are you not worried about the democratic precedent that treating citizens as de-facto minors and arbitrarily withholding information, with little to no oversight, will set? And your kids seeing the fully realized end of that slippery slope ?
What if your government decides that anything LGBT is taboo for kids[1]? Or that informations about say, ongoing genocides, is deemed too graphic for kids.
Won't that also increase the blast radius to people who didn't bother justifying their age, even though they supposedly also have the right to vote?
Two (very quick) minutes on their GitHub repo and it's pretty obvious that they're using firebase-analytics and at the very least seem to be sending URLs[1] and infos such as the model you download or the capacities[2] you use.
Legitimately curious, do you have some examples of great AI music ?
After getting bombarded with it in public spaces (namely cafés), I’ve come to see it as a worse copyright-free replacement for muzak.
I’ve even subconsciously begun avoiding these places. When my brain randomly decides it wants to pay attention to the music, the whole shtick sounds grating in an uncanny valley kind of way that’s almost impossible to un-hear.
Trying Lyria 2 after that ordeal might’ve also amplified my bias against it, as everything I prompted ended up sounding like a robotic top 50 pastiche.
Maybe there’s a parallel to made with LLM prose here ?
(disclaimer: while not a musician I do enjoy listening to human-made less-mainstream music)
I don’t think it holds up beyond passive listening for me, the violins sound quite off and break the illusion from the get go. But different strokes for different folks
I’ve found that a lot of developers would rather not have to think about where their application is going to run. This is a real shame, especially when there are free tools like SST that bridge the DevOps gap, making things like AWS and IAM less of a pain.
Even better, there are complete self-hostable platform solutions like Supabase or the classic Docker Compose. However, the shared downside with these solutions is that they require some setup when it comes to deploying, unlike the magic of Vercel.
I do wonder when we started losing interest about where our code is actually being executed ?
> when we started losing interest about where our code is actually being executed
I don't think we did - it's more that new programmers aren't forced to learn it, and a lot of them are lazy and only here for the money. The result is a lot of people who think all that matters is shipping quickly. To them, it doesn't matter that this will result in lots more work down the road once the product needs to scale up.
Not scaling up until needed is a fine strategy. Most products fail, so they don't ever need to scale up and spending the engineering hours to make it bulletproof is literally wasted effort. Wasting time and money at the start of a companies lifetime makes it more likely the business will go up in the first place. If you need to scale up, you will have lots more revenue to pay for that work than you do at the beginning.
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