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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

As a Frenchman, I chuckled at "In Britain, however, the French standard was interpreted in an erroneous way, due to which British orchestras commonly tuned to A = 439 Hz."

NOTE: I hope the word chuckle isn't interpreted as condescending, I only meant that this story is almost a perfect parable for our relationship with Great Britain throughout history, one of mutual defiance and refusal to acknowledge the other party as an equal even though I've always felt that there is some hidden love and respect going on at a deeper level on both sides.

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As a Brit, my reaction to a Frenchman is one of disgust as I reach for my insults. Yet there are few countries I would turn to so quickly in the search for a sane and good friend.

Perhaps it is easiest to say:

Where the USA has Russia, we have France. Where the USA has Canada, we have France.

Does it work the other way? I'm Canadian and a huge part of our culture is defined by the ways we are unlike Americans.

Can't imagine Anglo-French culture works quite like that.

Oh, England and France are entirely about the narcissism of small differences. (Also England and Scotland, hence the Auld Alliance of Scotland and France.)

And as an American, I don't know anyone who doesn't like Canada or Canadians, while simultaneously not understanding what makes it different other than basically superficial stuff (i.e. french language, metric, being polite, etc.)

So I don't think we have that England/France relationship at all either. It seems pretty special on the world stage.

From anyone familiar with it, is New Zealand and Australia's relationship at all similar to either Canada and USA or England and France?

NZ/Aus is pretty special. Most analogous to USA/Canada

The original point was that Britain/France have the superficial differences that let us be friends (USA/Canada) yet we have some deeper differences and historical differences that let us be enemies (USA/Russia).

The nice part of it is that we can carrot and stick ourselves with one neighbour, instead of making our enemy the devil incarnate.

More like Canada and USA.

- At one point New Zealand was part of the colony of New South Wales (until 1841, while the nation of Australia came into being in 1901)

- Australia and New Zealand have fought a number of wars together as close allies.

- Special visas available for New Zealanders in Australia (and vice versa I believe)

- Arch-rivals in sporting matches.

US-Canada also has that element of small-versus-large - the US looms (I imagine) much larger in the Canadian consciousness than Canada does in the American one, just because the US isn't so defined by that one neighbor.

Maybe more like Portugal-Spain? Hard to find examples like that where there haven't been any wars in a couple hundred years, and there's also that linguistic/cultural similarity.

As someone with two siblings he loves dearly, never has the phrase "brotherhood of nations" seemed so apt as UK/France.

'mocking' the French has been a mainstay of British humour for a very long time, including many classic Monty python caricatures.

I put mocking in quotes because it's always in good humour. There has always been a string English / French rivalry and I guess this has morphed to poking fun at each other.

It's always felt to me (a Brit) like a sort of sibling relationship. We can poke fun at each other all day long, but we'll defend each other from anyone else trying to do the same.

> our relationship with Great Britain throughout history

I've been watching some episodes of "Yes Minister", a British comedy show from about 30 years ago, and it's weird how much is still relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37iHSwA1SwE&t=027s

"Yes Minister" is up there with Shakespeare and Milton as one of the classics of British literature.

It's not just French/Britain. The book "How music works" describes how each country and, hell, cities, had different tunings, so an Italian singer with a perfect pitch visiting Germany cannot really perform. Maybe just the local organ builder had a different tuning fork when building the church and everyone tuned from there :)

Similar to how people didn't have standard time until relatively recently and the one clock at the town square can be off by quite a bit with the next town.

But from what I've read the British actually tried to adopt the French standard and made some conversion error, they didn't come up with their own thing independently.

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