On 09/11/13 12:05, Philippe Sigaud wrote:
I remember having friends coming from North Africa and speaking among themselves in Arabic, interspersed with French words, enough for me to get a global feeling of what was being said. Most interesting was that mathematical terms (that was during my studies) were all in French.
It's a consequence of the history of the education system -- with Arabic being the native language but French being the language of colonial administration and therefore the language of higher education, particularly things like maths. That split has persisted post-independence in much the same way that Latin persisted as the language of scholarship after the fall of the Roman empire.
You have exactly the same thing occurring in e.g. India with English -- and of course the English language itself is the long-term consequence of a similar blend between native (Anglo-Saxon) and elite (Norman French) languages.
Oh, on the mathematical terms -- when I was an undergraduate I had a professor who was Chinese, and one time I heard him on the phone to a Chinese colleague with the conversation going something like this: "[incomprehensible] x over y, [incomprehensible] integral of f dx ..."
