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Showing posts from December, 2014

Algeria and a Seemingly Distorted World (Part 1)

I woke up this morning struck with the, finally lucid, realisation that attempting to learn Derja or Kabyle for a Francophone zmigré over 18 is pointless. In a country where you would be justified to think the last thing needed is another French speaker, it turns out that irrationality, economics, and the neighbourhood's geopolitics will largely forgive you, if not encourage you, to simply come settle, and remain, on the strength of that ability alone: speaking French. When do we need to learn a language, or rather, when does a language become necessary to learn? The earliest evidence of language writing found so far shows it is economics that motivated writing, not the dire need to record love songs, although that came later. Economics is probably the preponderant factor that decides and motivates learning a language, and ultimately keeping up with it. Learning a language for the love of it, like setting poems in clay or stone, comes after. But the economics of