Franklin Court

Philadelphia
PA

The Market Street Houses at Franklin Court

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Includes Market Street Houses, Franklin’s house — completed in 1765 and razed in 1812 and now only a suggestive steel-frame outline — and an underground museum devoted to Franklin’s life and inventions.
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America had a common language, unlike the European nations, none of which was linguistically homogeneous. in 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. Englishmen from Yorkshire were incomprehensible to those from Cornwall and vice versa. By contrast, Americans could understand one another from Maine to Georgia. It was very obvious why this should be so, said John Witherspoon, president of Princeton. Since Americans were much more unsettled, and move frequently from place to place, they are not as liable to local peculiarities, either in accent or phraseology.

Gordon S. Wood
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)