In the traditional ceremony, known as “del Ventaglio” or “of the fan”,held at the beginning of summer, the Italian President of the Republic spoke about the need for journalists in Italy to start defending the Italian Language. This was Sergio Mattarella’s direct reaction to the traditional gift of a fan presented by journalists to the President of Italy. This year, the fan was made from pages of an Italian dictionary.
The message sent by the Italian journalists came to my mind in the midst of the local controversy about the way Maltese, in the written format, is being transformed. Recent changes made in the written format have made me, a former graduate of the Department of Maltese, a foreigner in my own country. My one consolation is tha tI am realizing that I am not the sole person having such feelings.
How a language is written is not a construct in a vacuum but is a process that developed over centuries. Therefore, any change needs to be studied within a historical and a cultural framework. Unfortunately, the changes made and the ones that are being proposed have, in my opinion, no historical or scholarly justification. This is why these reforms are putting the written Maltese language at risk.
Using Jan Kruse’s matrix of analysis, lexical changes need to fulfill four basic lements: interaction, syntax, semantic and thematic. Undoubtedly ,these changes failed the interaction test. I will limit myself to three examples to explain my point.
Trying to have words derived from Italian “sconto” and “secondo”, which in Maltese were in the past written “skont” and “skond” respectively, written in one format “skont” is a case in point why this whole exercise failed in its interaction objective. It ended up being the most mentioned example quoted by those who find these changes unacceptable.
Another example one can mention is “Ammen”. Until recently, Malta followed the whole Christian world in spelling Amen with one “m”. Even the Christians of Lebanon and Syria, from where the Semitic Christian words in Maltese are derived, say “Amen” and not “Ammen”. Maltese is now unique even where religious definitions are concerned. Worse still and even more dangerous is the fact that Amen has now been fossilized in a number of formal church inscriptions. This is going to increase rather than reduce confusion. How can one explain to students who visit our churches that the word Amen was correct in the past but it is no longer correct because the Maltese Parliament has decided to approve and sanction these bizarre changes?
The same goes for “risq”. We were taught that the correct way to write it was “riżq”, with “ż” as it is written in Arabic. At least, Maltese sought to keep the Arabic matrix for all the Semitic words. Now what was in the past considered a spelling mistake has become the correctwayto write it.
The changes are being presented as pragmatic choices but for most of the users of Maltese, the written medium is not arbitrary even if the written words, as the spoken language, are intertwined within a bigger and larger syntactic structure. It is here where the written format differs from the spoken one, as the spoken language is more often than not, defined as arbitrary.
Contemporary studies are on my side. The justifications given for such changes are proving one thing.We were told that these changes were done in respect of linguistic elements but seem to have forgotten the paralinguistic ones. They did not take in considerationthe prosodic cues, as part of our social identities. If the paralinguistic elements were taken into consideration, then those responsible for these reforms are taking these concepts to the extreme. Judging from the reaction to these changes, those responsible haveput the Maltese Language into a state of flux.
The reason for such a state of flux is due to the fact that those making these changes are ignoring one fundamental aspect, that of “interaction”. In simple words, the dynamics of the written language (with all its peculiarities) are different from the dynamics as to how that same language is spoken. The written language is more than what Leonard Bloomfield wrote. For Bloomfield, the written format is “merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks." The written format has a history backing it and with history there is anation’s identity, which demandsrespect.
From a linguistic or structural point of view, these may appear as simple segmental changes in a number of words, but when these changes are analyzed within the perspective of time structure, their repercussions are far more damaging than one might originally think.This explains why, for many, these changes do not appear coherent and this explains why they are being subjected to different interpretations and downright opposition.
The central motif of the written medium is not only that of communicating a non-verbal message but of bringing in social interaction. Yet, from a structural point of view, this element now risksnot being achieved as these changes arecreating more perplexity than solving any linguistic dilemma.
We already have an established literature created in Maltese. Now, we risk confusing individuals, as they have to take into account which books to read and the year in which it was published, if they want to use reading, as we were told, to enhance writing proficiency. Books in Maltese published prior to these changes cannot be read byyoungstudents as they are going to be hopelessly confounded in the way they oughtto write Maltese. Many will end up so confused,that they will become demotivated, especially avid readers whowill find the forms of written Maltese different to what they are being taught at school.
One could say that this was the case in the past before the Maltese alphabet was established. But then, the number of printed texts in Maltese was very limited compared to today. Therefore, students in particular are the first victims of these illogical changes, not forgetting all those, who like me, have studied the Maltese language according to the old rules. Now they will have to bear in mind the extensive list of changes effected in the writing of a number of Maltese words.
From an academic point of view I am curious to know the impact that these changes will have on the perceived readiness of Maltese pupils to learn a foreign language. I am sure that such an ability or willingness was in part due to how the Maltese language was written, where importance was given to the historic origins of the individual words. Our forefathers sought to respect, as much as possible, the diachronic aspect of our language.
Therefore, these changes should be considered as the first step towards the deconstructing of the established identity of the Maltese written language after having lost the oral format. Academia is committing the errorof inadvertently joining the general chorus by attacking another historical element that made Malta a Nation. These reforms are nothing but chiselling the Maltese Language. They can only be viewed by historians as the destruction of another constituent element that composed our national identity.