D french-speaking community

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

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 ..."