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.
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.”)
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.
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.
Deepseek will regularly spit out Chinese (汉字）during English sessions. They generally seem to be syntactically related but it makes me think that there's some overhead of using English with an engine that's primarily trained in Chinese.
This is huge. There's been 3rd party Signal library for this for years -- and for some reason I can't determine, the developers have opted NOT to do this.
this is why molly.im was a lifesaver for me.. trying to move a family member from VIBER to SIGNAL and ran into the annoying roadblock of not being able to link an Android tablet to an Android phone like Viber can - but molly does it fine.
"If you wish to use the same phone number for both Molly and Signal, you must register Molly as a linked device. Registering the same number independently on both apps will result in only the most recently registered app staying active, while the other will go offline."
Yeah, pretty sure that's what me and the other comment meant. Linked device, like using Signal on Desktop. Or Signal on iPad. Linking wasn't available on Signal for Android for some reason.
Specifically I'm using Signal as the main device, with Molly as the linked device on 2nd phone.
> “The outbound and cross-bound DDoS attacks can be just as disruptive as the inbound stuff,” Dobbin said. “We’re now in a situation where ISPs are routinely seeing terabit-per-second plus outbound attacks from their networks that can cause operational problems.”
ISPs are starting to feel the pain, so perhaps in the near future they will do something about it.
I, too, am jealous of China's high speed railroads. However, on the whole, China has overbuilt their infrastructure, and that may not look so smart in 40-50 years when the maintenance bills start coming due.
Is it factually true? Because some routes that I’m personally aware of are constantly over booked when it comes to rails. Some, I guess, might be overbuilt, but time will show. I’ll agree on some malls though, but it’s more like private stuff, than government-led initiatives.
So, perhaps 2020s China ~ 1950s US demographics. The bridges that recently collapsed in the US (2024 Baltimore/Francis Scott Key Bridge and 2007 Minneapolis I-35W Mississippi River Bridge) were built in 1964 and 1972-1977 respectively.
Noone has yet compared the Chinese construction times/costs to the replacement Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge: cost ~$2b, estimated October 2028. Will have 600ft bridge towers, 1600ft main span (increased from 1209ft), total span length 3300 ft, improved pier protection. Surprised they didn't add a freight rail link.
The Freestyle Pro is almost a good keyboard. The Esc and function keys are all offset to the left by one key compared to a standard layout, which drove me nuts. I have a Freestyle Edge RGB now, which I like much better. (Though I replaced the wrist rests with some from Goldtouch.)
Other than Jon at Cloudinary, everyone involved with JXL development, from creation of the standard to the libjxl library, works at Google Research in Zurich. The Chrome team in California has zero authority over them. They've also made a lot of stuff that's in Chrome, like Lossless WebP, Brotli, WOFF, the Highway SIMD library (actually created for libjxl and later spun off).
It's more likely related to security, image formats are a huge attack surface for browsers and they are hard to remove once added.
JPEG XL was written in C++ in a completely different part of Google without any of the safe vanity wuffs style code, and the Chrome team probably had its share of trouble with half baked compression formats (webp)
I'd argue the thread up through the comment you are replying to is fact-free gossiping - I'm wondering if it was an invitation to repeat the fact-free gossip, the comment doesn't read that way. Reads to me as more exasperated, so exasperated they're willing to speak publicly and establish facts.
My $0.02, since the gap here on perception of the situation fascinates me:
JPEG XL as a technical project was a real nightmare, I am not surprised at all to find Mozilla is waiting for a real decoder.
If you get _any_ FAANG engineer involved in this mess a beer || truth serum, they'll have 0 idea why this has so much mindshare, modulo it sounds like something familiar (JPEG) and people invented nonsense like "Chrome want[s] to kill it" while it has the attention of an absurd amount of engineers to get it into shipping shape.
(surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)
> JPEG XL as a technical project was a real nightmare
Why?
> (surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)
> (surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)
The fuck are you talking about? The jxl-rs library Firefox is waiting on is developed by mostly the exact same people who made libjxl which you say sucks so much.
In any case, JXL obviously has mindshare due to the features it has as a format, not the merits of the reference decoder.
> they'll have 0 idea why this has so much mindshare
Considering the amount of storage all of these companies are likely allocating to storing jpegs + the bandwidth of it all - maybe the instant file size wins?
Hard disk and bandwidth of jpegs are almost certainly negligible in the era of streaming video. The biggest selling point is probably client side latency from downloading the file.
We barely even have movement to webp &avif, if this was a critical issue i would expect a lot more movement on that front since it already exists. From what i understand avif gives better compression (except for lossless) and has better decoding speed than jxl anyways.
If you look at CDNs, WebP and AVIF are very popular.
> From what i understand avif gives better compression (except for lossless) and has better decoding speed than jxl anyways.
AVIF is better at low to medium quality, and JXL is better at medium to high quality. JXL decoding speed is pretty much constant regardless of how you vary the quality parameter, but AVIF gets faster and faster to decode as you reduce the quality; it's only faster to decode than JXL for low quality images. And about half of all JPEG images on the web are high quality.
The Chrome team really dislikes the concept of high quality images on the web for some reason though, that's why they only push formats that are optimized for low quality. WebP beats JPEG at low quality, but is literally incapable of very high quality[1] and is worse than JPEG at high quality. AVIF is really good at low quality but fails to be much of an improvement at high quality. For high resolution in combination with high quality, AVIF even manages to be worse than JPEG.
[1] Except for the lossless mode which was developed by Jyrki at Google Zurich in response to Mozilla's demand that any new web image format should have good lossless support.
> AVIF is better at low to medium quality, and JXL is better at medium to high quality.
BTW, this is no longer true. With the introduction of tune IQ (Image Quality) to libaom and SVT-AV1, AVIF can be competitive with (and oftentimes beat) JXL at the medium to high quality range (up to SSIMULACRA2 85). AVIF is also better than JPEG independently of the quality parameter.
JXL is still better for lossless and very-high quality lossy though (SSIMULACRA2 >90).
>The Chrome team really dislikes the concept of high quality images on the web for some reason though, that's why they only push formats that are optimized for low quality.
It would be more accurate to say Bit per Pixel (BPP) rather than quality. And that is despite the Chrome team themselves showing 80%+ of images served online are in the medium BPP range or above where JPEG XL excel.
Isn't medium quality the thing to optimize for? If you are doing high quality you've already made the tradeoff that you care about quality more than latency, so the precieved benefit of mild latency improvement is going to be lower.
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