The Trouble with France is......

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Great Vowel Shift, surely you don't mean Grimm's first law?

(It's a law that made all the p's sound like an f (pater -> father) along with a few other vowels)

In this regard, it's been said that French is closer to Latin somehow.

Also, the difference between french and english is that the english language apparently belongs to celtic tongues (this also includes german and dutch languages IIRC), whereas only a portion of the french language does (most likely the northern parts of France), the rest is mostly from latin (due to the proximity of Italy and therefore Rome).

wrong.
English is a Germanic language. French is Latin- based, or a Romance language- akin to Italian, Spanish, and ( oddly enough) Romanian.

Although the Breton ( in the northwest tip of France) are Celitic speakers (in fact thier language is virtually indentical to Welsh).

The Romans conquered Gaul. The celtic inhabitants became assimilated to Roman Latin, and became the French.

When the Romans abandoned Britian in the age of Arthur, the Germanic tribes of North Germany and the netherlands (the Angles and Saxons) invaded and kicked the Celtic natives out of the best parts of Britain. The Germanic tribes became the English, the Celts became the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, and those Celts that fled across the channel to Brittany became the Breton.

The Island of Britain was later pillaged and conquered by Vikings from Scandavia.
The Norwejian and Danish Vikings are also Germanic in origin.

So the English started out as mish-mosh of two branches of Germanic: mainland Germanic and Scandavian. Very little Celtic influence, but some Latin influence.

Both the Celtic and Anglo Saxon peoples of Britain were conquored by the French speaking Normans in 1066.

French became the language of the Aristocracy of Britian for three hundred years.

The result was modern English: a choatic pastiche of two kinds of Germanic languages, church latin, and Latin-by-way-of-French.

All these influences caused english to loose complicated grammar, but caused it to have complicated spelling ( I can spell in Spanish as well as I can in my native english but I can barely speak spanish- Spanish is quite user-friendly on paper ).

But one thing you can be grateful for if you're a nonnative who has to learn English. Its the one European language that lost that gender thing!

You dont have to worry about what sexual gender inanimate objects are in English, like you do in virtually every other European language.

it's always something; there used to be 2 'extra' letters, the yog and thorn; (one of which looked like a 'y', but sounded 'th'...which is why 'ye olde' was actually pronounced 'thee old'...

There's no gender in Finnish and the word for either "he" or "she" is hän.

Thats interesting.
Not surprising though because Finnish is one of the oddball languages of Europe that isnt Indo-European.

The Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Celtic languages,and Greek are all subdivisions of a larger family and all desceneded from an ancient common ancestor. Thay all have certaain common traits like dividing the universe into genders.

Finnish is part of a different family of languages spoken by tribal peoples in Siberia, and has no kin in the rest of Europe except a distant kinship with Hungarian (also not related to anything else in Europe except Finnish).

Non Indo European Finnish never had the gender thing. English is Indo European and did have it, but lost it at some point.

In contrast is German in which " a young woman has no sex, but a turnip does!' ( Mark Twain), or French in which "vagina" is femanine ( as youd expect) but "uterus" is masculine.

The other very ambiguous sentence that english speakers use is : "I'm going out to see a friend." =P In french, you'd have to precise the gender, which gives additionnal information about what you do.

I thought that Estonian is another Finno-Ugric language. The people of Karelia and Komi, which are near Finland, also speak such language, as do people in Urdmurtia.

Estonian and Finnish are very close and both countries watched each other's TV but some words in each language may have the same spelling but mean wildly different things so a lot of humor can be generated over the differences.

I find a lot of redundancy in French in terms of communication. There are typically 15 different forms for each verb depending on who is doing it, when they are doing it and whether they are factually doing it or notionally doing it. I'm currently learning French. I don't find the grammar difficult so much as verbose... too many verb forms to remember especially with written French.

I like to torture French people with my bad grammar at every opportunity though surprisingly many tell me I speak good French.

Actually, you can have some fun with the French by using verb forms that have fallen into disuse, like the simple past and the past subjunctive.

For example: "J'espère que la nourriture que vous bouffâtes fût bonne."

"I hope that the food that you have gobbled was good" - I think I'm missing the fun bit that you are referring to; please enlighten me.

A question for the French experts reading this thread: Does anyone know where I can find a definitive list of the (old and new) words that were affected by the official 1990 spelling changes? I've Googled for hours and can only find lists of the rules to be applied in changing old spellings to new. I've also found a list of a couple of thousand words with the new spellings but I need to know what the old spellings were too. I need a lookup list of all the words with both their old spelling and new spelling. I think there are supposed to be around 5000 words changed in total.

He combined a slang verb while using a very formal grammatical tense.

I see now. Thank you. It is one of those humorous situations when a poorly educated person tries to put on a "posh accent" and uses formal grammar but accidentally uses a slang word, resulting in them looking silly. A staple of TV comedy series.

Huh? I never heard of this.

you're right. The Finns do have ethnic nieghbors who speak related Uralian languages in that same sub-artic corner of Europe that didnt get swamped by Indo-European Languages. I was oversimplifying a bit. The big nations that border Finnland use Indo European languages (Scandanavian to the West, and Slavic to the East).

When the Finns werent being oppressed by the Kings of Sweden, they were being oppressed by the Czars of Russia. After WWI they finnally got their own country and thier own written language- the youngest written language in Europe.

I hear they're crumbled cake is pretty good.