"United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym

That's why they use EUA (États-Unis d'Amérique) for the abbreviation.

I have to say I had never encountered this abbreviated form
- Fake french. Get 'em, boys.
But we tend to forget de A so just ÉU

In Spanish you can see EEUU for «Estados Unidos». The letters are doubled because they're plural.

I still pronounce it as Eeeh Eeeh Uu Uu. Its just fun to say.
I’ve always wondered why spanish speakers online use EEUU for the US. I once asked a friend of mine and he said “that’s just the way it is”; this is a much better explanation lol

To detract from the confusion the European Union is Union Européenne (UE) in French.

I thought it would be so funny if any of the EU employees would go to a bar in Brussels (majority French-speaking) and have an aneurysm explaining what they do to a local in broken French. Not that it would ever happen... but it would be funny

ITT: Americans struggling to comprehend languages other than their own

So “Etats” is “State”… just written backwards?

🤯
If you want to be serious, the word state and état are both coming from an older version of French when it was written estat. French replaced ES with É because it wasn't pronouncing the S, while English dropped the E and kept pronouncing the S. It happened to multiple words, although some also come from Latin.
Étrange - Strange. Époux - Spouse. École - School. Épice - Spice. Éponge - Sponge.
It also happened with circumflex.
Hôpital - Hospital. Forêt - Forest. Pâte - Paste.
Here's a whole video about exactly this.
Ah alors tu as découvert comment est-ce que le français fonctionne. Désolé pas désolé
- ah so you have discovered in your comment how french functions.
  what's Desole?
- What a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious statement!
"États" is "States" ☝️🤓

The French and acronyms. You got NATO, but the French translate it so they call it OTAN. Directly translated, they also just say the 'States United'.

Anyone's guess who did word order first to find out why French is a silly language.

French predates English.
Also, bold calling a language silly in english
- I decided to look into this because I was curious.
  The unification and regulation of the French language came about in 1653 with the founding of the Académie Française and it actually took a while for the revolutionaries to pivot from “liberty of language” to “the only language in France should be French” English was already established by this time and the vowel shift was basically complete.
  According to Wikipedia, Middle French died out in the 17th century while Middle English died out in the 15th. Ergo: Modern English predates Modern French
  If we check back farther it seems the two languages developed similarly though the arbitrary divides for each age of language (old, middle, modern) seem to show with English being first by roughly a century.
  Of course this is all arbitrary since language doesn’t evolve discretely. However the Wikipedia entries for the oldest Gallo-Romance (precursor to French) is from 842CE, whereas old English poetry dates as early as 650-700CE. Once again suggesting English predates French.
  Now there is a difficulty here with French because it originates from Vulgar Latin which could be considered older than English, but I’m not sure many would call it French since lots of European languages branched from Vulgar Latin
  As for silliness… yeah no arguments there lol
- This comment belongs right in a badling sublemmy.
Japanese sentences (clauses) end with the verb. In Kiswahili/Shimaore a noun is followed by its possessive pronoun ("cup my", "spirit their"...). Languages are very diverse in that regard
To be fair the same happens in Spanish with most acronyms

Um..... It is an acronym my guy. How do you think French people write USA?

Shouldn't Spanish have the same problem? I've seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?

Same as another user said, in Spanish European Union is Unión Europea, so abbreviates to UE, and you’re right about EEUU, because it’s the United States

In Polish, "United States" is Stany Zjednoczone, but the acronym is USA, even though that doesn't match up at all

But Unia Europejska is UE
- Union Européenne as well, and French is one of the languages they actually care about

In Serbo-Croatian, the acronym is САД. It transliterates to SAD.