Noncompositional

Take a snowclone like “A is the B of C,” examples of which can be found by, say, searching Google for “is the Tom Cruise of”. This sort of phrase is just asking for field-specific specialization. Take linguistics…

As everyone knows, thanks to the magical process of sound change, the modern French language, especially its spelling and phonology, are totally messed up and weird. And since this is so well known, it easily fills the B slot in the above construction, as in a comment by Bill Poser on Languagehat:

Mandarin pronounciations are not very helpful in understanding etymologies from this period because Mandarin has lost most coda consonants and done various other weird things: its the French of Sinitic.

When it comes to talking about phonology, sound change, orthography, and their interrelations, saying that Language X is the French of Language group Z is something akin to saying that it has undergone extensive sound change and (final) consonant/syllable loss, is noticably different from its closest related languages, and often that its orthography does not match well with the pronunciation of its words, mostly due to said sound changes. Yet another post on Languagehat discusses Tibetan orthography, which I suppose would have to be the French of Tibeto-Burman (in fact the case is closer than with Mandarin, since Tibetan uses an alphabet). This seems tangentially related to the essentialist explanations of languages (in the form “Lx X is just like Lx Y under some conditions C”)

Of course other comparisons with French are available (and inevitable?), such as one Chinese Forum poster’s thoughts on Cantonese:

I think Cantonese is the French of the Asian languages– very pleasing to the ear

Surely there must be some more interesting languages to put in the B slot besides French. Japanese has a notoriously “interesting” writing system (which I love, by the way) and all the politeness stuff (though I think Korean beats it on the politeness morphology front), and English also has a history full of stuff like massive lexical borrowing. Be creative! Also feel free to shake up the formula. How about “Mandarin” is Chinese for “French”?