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Charles Vial

شارل فيال

Notable figure b. 1928 · Source: Yahya Murad, Muʿjam asmaʾ al-mustashriqin (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), p. 812 · Second source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, authority record: Vial, Charles (1928-....)

From France; worked in Egypt

Field: Literature

Affiliation

Translator of al-Jahiz; glossary of written Egyptian

Biography

Born in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, he trained at the École normale supérieure of Saint-Cloud and spent 1954–1955 at the French Institute in Damascus. He taught Arabic at Bordeaux, at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris and then at the University of Provence in Aix, and took his doctorate with a thesis on the figure of woman in the Egyptian novel and short story, 1914–1960 (1974). He translated four epistles of al-Jahiz with a glossary and index (Cairo, 1976), and gathered the colloquial words used in modern Egyptian fiction into a glossary, L'Égyptien tel qu'on l'écrit (1983).