Today I discovered the website of Tunisian-born linguist Louis-Jean Calvet, where I found a wealth of interesting posts on ‘Mediterranean languages’. A little press review for you to enjoy. While we wait to practise Darija!
- On mixed languages
- Lecture given at a conference in Tunis on 17 February 2006.
With the history of the lingua franca, now extinct, and a few words and expressions. And how the ‘calculate’ in Beur slang comes from the confusion of two Arabic verbs, hasaba and hasiba (pronunciation be damned). - Linguistic diversity: what’s at stake for the French-speaking world?
- A fairly general, but very interesting, post, particularly on the evolution of the weight of lesser-spoken languages on the Internet, as character encodings arrive, and the decline in the weight of English. Remember that Amazigh now has its own unicode! Furthermore, this post also implicitly deals with the problems of multilingualism throughout North Africa, where each of the former French colonies has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to arabise, and this has been painful for other languages, such as Berber or even Hassani in Morocco.
- Aspects also addressed in “the language war”
- Post in English, dealing with the link between politics and language, and between economics and language too. An issue that Berbers know all about!
- Science in Arabic
- Still on the same issue, an analysis of the relationship between scientific translations from/into a language and its research activity (to be supplemented by this other, somewhat redundant post). Many words in mathematics and astronomy come from Arabic.
- Last but not least, multilingualism in Alexandria
- Alexandria, a cosmopolitan port and city for centuries (many centuries, enough to last at least two millennia), must not have been very different from Tangiers, an international city until decolonisation, managed by seven countries, with just as many posts and languages…
And if you want to write Moroccan Arabic (darija), there’s a site that offers a clear method (but not for learning the language): ktbdarija.com (ktb for the triliteral root of writing in the broad sense, al katib, the writer, mektoub, it is written (it is destiny), al kitab, the book).
Unfortunately, Louis-Jean Calvet’s archives disappeared when the website of what is now the University of Aix Marseille was redesigned. I have left this post ‘for the record’, but it has lost a lot of its meaning with the absence of the links corresponding to the quotations.
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