In the context of her remarks about the spelling of what she calls “errors” and specifically the Maltese word ‘denfil’, Daphne Caruana Galizia states that “... in every language where the name of this mammal is built around the consonants d-l-f-n, they follow that order of pronunciation: in Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and English” (TMIS, 15 January). The same journalist had earlier in the same article proclaimed: “Nobody will convince me that these forms of spelling are anything other than barbaric, and that the obsessive adherence to the rules without exception, when every other language I know of makes exceptions to the rules, is worse than puerile.”
The question I ask myself when confronted with articles such as these, together with copious helpings of more in the same edition of the paper as well as in last Sunday’s (22 January), is whether linguists round the world have, for at least the last two centuries, been fooling the international academic community into thinking that linguistics is a scientific discipline requiring, among other things, the utilization of scientific method, when journalists and other lay people can cavalierly express such unshakeable pronouncements on the subject.
In the course of its development, French has shed (probably through the “errors” of “the poorly educated” ancestors of the sans-culottes, pace all upholders of French culture and civilisation) a hypothetical original ‘l’ in certain contexts: the spelling of the French word ‘dauphin’ for “dolphin” of course, very decidedly lacks an ‘l’ (cf for instance, ‘chaud’ “hot, warm” and compare Italian ‘caldo’). Maybe Ms Caruana Galizia can convince herself that this particular form of French spelling is not “barbaric” and “worse than puerile” just because it follows French pronunciation? And are we to judge the Italians less “barbaric” than their French cousins because they paid their Roman ancestors the compliment of retaining a hypothetical original ‘l’ in their pronunciation and in their spelling?
Linguistic change over time is a fact of life. If speakers of Maltese lack “cultural depth” because they treat the noun ‘problema’ as feminine, whereas the Italian original is masculine, how shall we judge these same hapless speakers when they even get their Arabic wrong! In Classical Arabic in fact the word for “head” is masculine, whereas in Maltese ‘ras’ is (uncontroversially) feminine. Could it be that “cultural depth” extends only to a knowledge of English and Italian as the more immediate linguistic influences on Maltese? If everyone today and throughout history were seriously to retain the “origin of words” as the criterion for linguistic behaviour, we would find ourselves speaking in the same tongue Eve used when talking to Adam!
In so-called living languages, varieties of the same language exist side by side, and very often one of them is chosen as the Standard, not for any intrinsically linguistic consideration, but purely on non-linguistic grounds, such as for social or political reasons. It is not difficult to imagine that if most speakers of the Cockney variety of English were to become millionaires, leading cultural and artistic luminaries or University dons, so-called Queen’s English would be in serious trouble, in spite of the relentless vilification of Cockney and its speakers.
However there is also variation within one variety. In general, older people more accustomed to an Italianate cultural norm would tend to say ‘patologu’, for instance, for “pathologist”, whereas younger speakers more exposed to the influence of English, would tend to say ‘patologist’ or ‘patologista’. Such variants co-exist for a time, usually until one of them becomes extinct. This is the situation too for such variants as ‘pirmli’, ‘pinuri’, ‘pinnoli’ or ‘pilloli’, reflecting as they do different stages of assimilation in a loan word.
Historically, modern Maltese has in the main not developed by deriving new word forms from existing consonant roots, e.g. ‘tisliba’ for “crossword puzzle” from the root ‘s-l-b’. Forms like ‘mitjar’ for “airport” from the consonant root for ‘tar’ “he flew” or ‘mirmed’ for “ashtray” from the root in ‘rmied’ “ashes” have never really gained acceptance. Instead, Maltese develops and grows by borrowing and integration. Early on, when the sound of ‘p’ was foreign and unknown to speakers of Maltese Arabic, just as it is to contemporary speakers of Arabic, we utilised the closest resources offered by the language and coined ‘ballun’ “ball” and ‘bandla’ “swing” from Romance originals with an initial ‘p’. I take it no one now wants to introduce the writing ‘pallun’ or ‘pandla’ as proof of the “cultural depth” of Maltese. Some of the earliest loans from English reflect a stage where the Maltese heard English spoken, but were not yet reading it: that is why we have ‘skuna’ for “schooner”, or ‘bajla’ from “boiler”. Much later, when they were also reading it, the memory of what they saw prevailed upon the perception of what they must have heard and so we have ‘kuker’ and so many others, even though the variety of English, which is usually looked upon as the model by the Maltese (Received Pronunciation) does not sound the final ‘r’.
It is perfectly legitimate for a language to borrow words from another language and make them its own, but also, in so doing, to adapt them to its native patterns. The fallacy about the discussion of “erroneous” forms like ‘denfil’, ‘problema’ and thousands of others is precisely that: far from being erroneous, these are now part and parcel of modern contemporary Maltese; or would some prefer to see Maltese fossilized in the stage it was in when our forefathers spoke it in the Middle Ages? Loan words follow phonological and grammatical patterns of adaptation by means of which they become new words in the receiving language. For instance, Maltese has a well established phonological rule whereby a final so-called “voiced” consonant (within a certain group) becomes “voiceless”: this is the reason why we write ‘bieb’ for “door’ even though we say “biep”. The identity of the final consonant comes out, in this case, in the plural “bibien”. The spelling ‘-gli-‘ in the Italian word ‘famiglia’ represents a single sound in the phonological system of Italian, unknown in Maltese. The spelling ‘familja’ represents the phonological adaptation of this loan word to Maltese sound patterns. ‘Film’ is today part of Standard Maltese (note the Maltese ‘l’ whose sound is different from the English one). The plural of this Maltese loan word is ‘films’. Following the rules of Maltese phonology, the final ‘s’ is pronounced “s”, whereas in English, the final consonant of the word “films” is pronounced “z”. The plural of the noun ‘skuna’ mentioned earlier is ‘skejjen’. Our young (and not so young) people happily say ‘essemmessjajt’ to state that they sent a text message. Why shouldn’t the adaptation taking place in the spoken language also be reflected in the writing? Maybe some are not convinced these loan words are really part of Maltese? The logical extension of this line of reasoning would involve the Maltese still speaking a form of Tunisian/Sicilian Arabic.
To your “angry and sad” correspondent dismayed at seeing Maltese “being polluted” (TMIS, 22 January), I would reply that, following the intervention of one of the foreign participants at the conference he mentioned, I was expressing my regret that Maltese has practically lost its rich vocabulary of native baby words, only to replace them with a new set largely borrowed from English. The example I quoted (and not made up), however, shows the process of grammatical adaptation at work. In ‘Aghmillha wejvi l-flegi’ the English verb ‘to wave’ has been turned into a Maltese noun, object of the verb ‘aghmel’. Using Maltese writing for new Maltese forms, I would have thought, should not be a matter for controversy.
And finally to the question of “euro”. If your correspondents are living in the same country I inhabit, then they must be hearing at least two spoken versions of the word: “juro” and “ewro”. In the run up to Malta’s accession to the EU, much was made of the desirability and richness of cultural diversity, and of the principle that small was beautiful (how’s that by the way, for an English word half spelt in French?). If the Maltese word for “Europe” is uncontroversially ‘Ewropa’, and if the intention in coining the name of the new monetary unit was to make it hark back to the name of the continent, what fault does Maltese have that its name for the continent does not have the exact form it has in other European languages? Is the name of the currency only meant to hark back to the name of the continent only for speakers of French, German, English and some others? I have a vivid
memory of an eminent European extolling Maltese for being the only Semitic language of Europe: but maybe that was the cue before accession!
Albert Borg
Institute of Linguistics
The University of Malta