france

  1. Maciamo

    5 reasons France is so backwards compared to its neighbours

    As everyone knows France sucks. It's a horrible country that nobody wants to visit except for 90 million tourists per year. :kidding: And of course people from neighbouring countries know that well and try to avoid setting foot in France if they can help it. For example official statistics show...
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    Breakdown of R1b subclades by French region

    I have calculated the frequency of each of the main R1b clade in every region of France last year in order to update the R1b maps. I used Nevgen to determine the subclades of samples from FTDNA that were not confirmed by SNP testing. It seems that I forgot to post the table with the results, so...
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    Best and worst Kings of France

    I have just written a new article attempting to answer the question: Who were the best and worst Kings and regent Queens of France in history? As usual your feedback is welcome.
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    Common English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words of Arabic origin

    Wikipedia has list of words of Arabic origin by language. But these lists are typically long and include plenty of rare and arcane words, or words that are specific to Arabic culture or to Islam. Other words came from Persian (e.g. assassin, aubergine, candy, caravan, cheque, chess, lemon, lime...
  5. Maciamo

    Different suffixes in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese

    If you already speak one Romance language, learning another one is going to be relatively easy. The grammar is basically the same and over 80% of the vocabulary is shared. The lexical similarity is even 89% between Spanish and Portuguese, and also 89% between Italian and French. But there are...
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    Spanish, Portuguese and French words that changed gender from Latin

    A great advantage of being a native speaker of a Romance language is that the gender (masculine or feminine) is the same in over 99% of cases in other Romance languages, which makes learning them much easier than for speakers of non-Romance languages (and English, which is half-Romance but lost...
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    Spanish words that acquired an a- at the beginning (unlike other Romance languages)

    One striking characteristic of Spanish language is the number of words that start with 'a'. Many among those are Arabic loan words (adobe, ajedrez, alcade, aldea, alquiler), including words that are an amalgamation of the Arabic preposition al (the) + the word itself (e.g. albahaca, alcázar...
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    The disappearance of the Spanish 'f' sound

    Anyone who speaks Spanish and at least one other Romance language will probably have noticed that many f sounds have disappeared entirely in Spanish, usually at the beginning of words. This atavistic 'f' has been replaced by a silent 'h', which at one point during the Middle Ages might have been...
  9. Maciamo

    French words starting in ch- compared to other Romance languages

    One particularity of French is that many 'c' sounds changed into 'ch' (pronounced 'sh'). I have made a list of most of the words I could think of derived from Latin that underwent that mutation. Many of them were inherited by English (chain, chamber, change, chapel, charge, chaste), but a few...
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    List of quaint, idiosyncratic or unfortunate French surnames

    France is the country with the most diversity of surnames in Europe along with Italy. According to the list of surnames in France on Filae.com, there are 1.3 million different surnames in France today, although a substantial percentage are foreign names. In fact, in this list over 800,000...
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    Y-DNA frequencies of France updated

    I have updated the Y-DNA frequencies of French regions and calculated the percentages for R1b subclades. You can see the updated Y-DNA maps here.
  12. Maciamo

    Updated R1b maps of France

    I have added new samples for each region of France and calculated the haplogroup frequencies anew for each region. But most importantly I managed to get a much more accurate distribution of R1b subclades, especially for DF27 and U152 - both being far more widespread than previously thought...
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    Health Anti-vaxxer movement strongest in France

    The French like to do things differently from everyone else. In the last few months they have made the headlines around the world for the dogged refusal to get vaccinated against Covid-19. The reasons are varied. Some people believe in the wildest conspiracy theories, claiming that the...
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    Genetic analysis of Ancient Gaul

    I have created a page dedicated the the genetics of ancient Gauls. I calculated the Dodecad K12b average percentages for 16 Gaulish samples and ran them against modern populations in Vahaduo to obtain the closest matches.
  15. Jovialis

    560,000-year-old milk tooth of (likely) homo heidelbergensis found in France

    The fossil was discovered on Monday evening in the Arago Cave, a vast prehistoric grotto at Tautavel on the French side of the Pyrenees mountains bordering Spain. The site's laboratory confirmed the tooth belonged to a human sub-species, likely homo heidelbergensis, which shares features with...
  16. Jovialis

    Visual Arts Locals angered over artwork covering medieval French fortress

    Thankfully it's only temporary, I would be outraged by this as well. Why would you do this to such a beautiful building?
  17. A

    How similar are Spaniards and Southern French people? Common ancestry?

    Are the haplogroups for both groups nearly identical? What differences are there, if any, for both y DNA and even maternal DNA? Caesar said the aquitanians were essentially Spaniards, is that true even today when it comes to genetics and linguistics and culture? Thanks
  18. Maciamo

    Southern Neolithic route brought Megaliths from the Levant to Western Europe

    I have hypothesised for several years that the wave of Neolithic farmers who came from the southern Levant through North Africa brought a quite different set of haplogroups and autosomal admixture than the Anatolian farmers that colonised the Balkans and Central Europe. There is ample...
  19. Maciamo

    What's the origin of Franco-German formality?

    If there is one thing that distinguishes French and German speakers from English speakers or even other Europeans is their insistence on using formal vous or Sie instead of the informal tu or Du in any situation where two adults aren't on familiar terms (i.e. close friends or family). This...
  20. Maciamo

    French "aujourd'hui" (today), a redundant expression?

    French language has become weirdly corrupted and illogical over time. It has even been said that the French are so rational and cerebral because it is necessary to understand all the grammatical oddities of their language. Let's have a look at the word aujourd'hui, meaning today. In most...
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