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Comment by matthewaveryusa | Hacker News Reader

It's somewhat ironic that both interviewers are critiquing Camus as ~ colonial-washing Algeria -- in French.

What's the point in bringing up Camus stating he would save his mother over Algeria as something telling about his work?

When I read l'etranger I found the emptiness of the world lead me into feeling the absurdity as an emotion versus a thought experiment.

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Algeria has a lot of identity issues, the intelligentsia almost exclusively communicate in french, while the lower classes speak a mutant hybrid of Arabic-French-English (the English is mostly present with zoomers due to internet exposure)

"the lower classes speak a mutant hybrid of Arabic-French-English"

Very interesting, since English is a sort of mutant hybrid of Norse-Germanic-French. I wonder how long before a unique "Algerian" language emerges. I wonder how that compares to how long it took english to develop, i'd wager algerian will develop a lot quicker thanks to globalism/internet/etc.

One could compare Arabic dialects/languages [0] to Slavic languages about 700 years ago. The dialects/languages are actively diverging due to different cultural ties and influences each country experiences, but due to the internet there's a regular cultural interflow keeping a certain level of mutual intelligibility with other "Arabic-speaking" groups.

In this metaphor Algerian is probably Polish or Czech in the 14th century.

[0]: This is a loaded and inaccurate term used here for brevity.

'Algerian' is already recognized as a distinct spoken and kinda-sorta-written language/subdialect (people call it dziriyya). When it comes to writing it regular people basically just mix Arabic chat alphabet and French characters in order to communicate on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc but you won't see this form of writing on anything official, or when writing in pen & paper

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