Nasr Zacharia (ed.) The dictionary of economics and commerce: English-French-Arabic

London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980. — xii, 212 p. — (Macmillan reference books). — ISBN 9781349035557 (eBook).The user of this glossary cannot fail to realize quickly how much Arab economic terminology owes to both English and French. The linkage in this process of borrowing from these two main international languages in the different parts of the Arab world reflects the colonial traditions of the past several decades. Usually trained in Anglo-Saxon or French universities, Arab scholars in the modern sciences, especially those that relate to social evolution, have displayed a considerable degree of imagination in Arabic word formation which has helped to enrich and modernize one of the few classical languages that is still a living medium of communication. However, we in the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, out of experience in working together with Arabs drawn from different cultural and historical backgrounds, have found that the process of word formation in economics was still in a fluid state. The need to coordinate and consolidate this process seemed therefore a pressing objective not only for better communication but also in order to enable Arab social scientists to concentrate on the more substantive, rather than semantic, aspects of cultural evolution.