More people than expected turned up at the Bibliotheca on Tuesday for a conference celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of the man we know as De Soldanis – Canon Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius, to give him his full name and title – who assumed and added De Soldanis to his surname, perhaps a twist on his mother’s surname, Sultana. The historian and writer was born on 31 October 1712.

The event was organised by the National Library, the Gozo Ministry, Heritage Malta and the University’s Ghaqda tal-Malti, with Olvin Vella acting as compère/master of ceremonies.

The event also included an exhibition, previously mounted in Gozo, of books, documents and manuscripts relating to De Soldanis. I looked everywhere but could not find my favourite, included on this page – the title page of a book about Gozo, in which De Soldanis calls Gozo a “Mediterranean island” which is adjacent to Malta “an African island”. A North-South divide from 250 years ago, but not the way we usually see things.

Rosabelle Carabott, the author of a booklet about De Soldanis for schoolchildren, spoke about his huge dictionary and grammar, which she described as his masterpiece and which she is currently editing. He may have thought Maltese derived from Punic, but his books are a mine of information not just on words in Maltese, with their foreign equivalents, but also quotations from classical literature, words that had disappeared even then, and a wealth of information about customs, traditions, social values and beliefs, as well as children’s games and recipes.

Prof. Keith Sciberras spoke about the friendship between De Soldanis and French painter Antoine de Favray and, in a charming interlude, a student recited from De Soldanis what two women visiting told each other in the stilted Maltese of the time, a visit exemplified by Favray in some of his paintings including one in the Louvre and one that has been loaned for the exhibition at the Bibliotheca.

Kenneth Gambin described the cuisine and eating habits of those times, while Claire Bonavia described the clothes that were worn. Both the eating habits and the clothing habits changed according to the social standing of the individual.

With Janica Magro, things livened up as she described the enmity harboured by Padre Pelagio, a Capuchin monk, for De Soldanis. The two, together with Ignazio Saverio Mifsud, were supposedly friends, but in private documents Padre Pelagio was highly critical of De Soldanis – who he accused of being a social climber and worse.

In his craze to dismiss De Soldanis and everything he stood for, Padre Pelagio even carped that De Soldanis had a speech impairment when, in all probability, it was just the Gozitan dialect and its way of pronouncing certain consonants.

Finally, Professor Frans Ciappara tried to establish the role of De Soldanis in the history of the Maltese language.

We are normally led to think that Mikiel Anton Vassalli was the father of the Maltese language, but De Soldanis, who came before him, outlined much of what Vassalli was to say more than a hundred years later. There are clear instances where Vassalli actually copied from De Soldanis, and while Vassalli included only words coming from Semitic, De Soldanis also included words from the Latin languages.

Nor was De Soldanis any inferior to Vassalli in his patriotism. When the slaves rose up, De Soldanis, in Il Bassa Mustafa, castigated the Order for trampling all over the rights of the Maltese. Grand Master Pinto reported him to Rome and De Soldanis was ordered to apologise.

On the other hand, together with his friend Ignazio Saverio Mifsud, De Soldanis may have been well travelled, but he was cocooned in a reactionary world and felt nothing of the coming Enlightenment. Vassalli, on the other hand, was nothing if not a child of the Enlightenment.