Dear readers, for today’s beach aerobics, repeat this exercise after me: grandparents, grandchildren, granddaughter and grandson; uncle and aunt, nephew and niece; grandparents, grandchildren, uncle and aunt, nephew and niece. Go on, jump up and down making X-shapes with your arms and legs and chant repeatedly: grandparents have grandchildren; uncles and aunts have nephews and nieces; nephews are boys or men; nieces are girls or women; the child of my son or daughter is my grandchild, not my nephew; the child of my sibling, or of my spouse’s sibling, is my nephew or my niece; grandparents have grandchildren; grandparents have grandchildren; grandparents have grandchildren.

What brought this on? It was a fit of steaming irritation at the way the Social Policy Ministry has given official sanction to one of the most common mistakes made by Maltese people when speaking English: referring to grandchildren as nephews. It is not an insignificant mistake, because the meanings of grandson and nephew are entirely different and so are the familial relationships they describe. When this fundamental error is made in a question-and-answer booklet about the plans for rent reform, issued by a government ministry, it is tantamount to giving the wrong information. A leaseholder’s grandchild does not have the same rights, or relationship to, the leaseholder as his or her nephew or niece.

This is taken from page 7 of the booklet’s English-language version, Rent Laws, The Need for Reform – Sustainability, Justice and Protection. Question: “I have been living with my grandparents for the past 10 years. Do I understand correctly that under the proposed reforms I will no longer be eligible for automatic inheritance to the title of the lease?” I’ll throw a tactful blanket of silence over the construction of that question, most particularly the hideous last phrase, and focus on the answer instead. Answer: “…As the nephew or the niece of the tenant you will not qualify as a beneficiary for causa mortis inheritance…”

The reference to causa mortis indicates that the English version was written by a lawyer working from the original Maltese. Please, somebody tell me that I’m wrong about this, and that the translation was the work of a sixth-former on summer work experience, who learned English as a third language. Otherwise, I will have to face up to the fact that there are lawyers running around in Malta, in full possession of a warrant to practise, who do not know that the English word for our children’s children is grandchildren and not nephews, and who are dangerously transcribing this error into important documents, thereby changing their meaning completely.

How is it possible to be a lawyer in Malta and not know the difference between a grandson and a nephew? How? How is it possible to live in a country where English is widely spoken and ubiquitous in its written form, and never come across the words “grandson” and “granddaughter” and wonder what they mean, and if that meaning might just possibly be different to “nephew” and “niece”?

You ask why I have written a column about such a minor matter. It’s not a minor matter at all, because it raises all sorts of ancillary issues, not least the two I have just mentioned: lawyers (and more worryingly, notaries) who don’t know the difference between grandchildren and nephews in the English language, and people from all walks of life, not just the uneducated, who have somehow managed to live for decades in an English-speaking country without learning the difference between “nephew” and “grandchild”. I think it’s really amazing.

This “nephews” business has bothered me for so long that seeing the error enshrined in full glory in a public information document – issued by the ministry responsible for the family, no less – caused me to explode with annoyance. I have kept a polite and civilised zip on my mouth through countless cocktail parties and “receptions” while an endless parade of men and women talked to me lovingly about the antics of their nephews. In the early years, I thought they were fond and overly involved aunts and uncles. Then I began to realise that they were talking about their grandchildren.

On the drive home from one such feat of endurance I asked my husband to help me decipher the mystery of why the word “grandchildren” seemed to have gone missing from the Maltese version of the English language. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “There isn’t a word for grandchildren in Maltese. Nephews, nieces and grandchildren are all neputijiet. It’s the same with Italian. They don’t have a specific word for grandchildren, either.”

Well, thanks – I knew that. But it isn’t an explanation; it’s an excuse. The mystery to me is why people who are able to hold conversations in English without difficulty, to read English-language books and newspapers, and to translate, as in this case, a document on rent reform, firmly believe that English, like Maltese and Italian, has no word to describe the specific relationship between a person and his or her child’s child. I can’t, for the life of me, believe that they have never heard the word “grandchildren” or that they somehow believe that this is an optional word which is interchangeable with “nephews”.

The refusal to use the word “grandson”, or even to accept that it has a meaning that is specific and not ambiguous like the Maltese and Italian neputi and nipote, drives me to distraction. It speaks of the most obtuse pig-headedness.

* * *

The words we use to describe the relationship between various family members are an indication of how family relationships were once ordered and organised in that society. Maltese, for example, uses the Arabic word for mother but not the Arabic word for father. Our word for father is a much later construction, a corruption of the French monsieur. This probably indicates that mothers were local girls, rooted in the island, but men came and went, so that fathers were more likely to be foreigners who were referred to with the respectful monsieur. This looseness of the relationship between parents might be why we commonly refer to our spouse as The Man (ir-ragel) and The Woman (il-mara), rather than as the more accurate zewgi (zewg literally meaning a pair, from which the Maltese word for marriage is derived).

Not having a specific word to distinguish between our relationship with our children’s children and our relationship with our siblings’ children could mean all manner of things – that the distinction wasn’t important enough to have a specific word coined for it, that people didn’t live long enough to accumulate grandchildren, that the only significant relationship was that between parents and children, and more particularly, between mother and child. The anthropologists can throw more light on this.

The knowledge that Maltese uses the same word for grandchildren, nephews and nieces came to me fairly late in life. I realise in retrospect that I never once heard any of my four grandparents referring to their grandchildren as neputijiet, but only ever as it-tfal tat-tifla or it-tfal tat-tifel. That’s still how my own parents speak about theirs. I grew up thinking that Maltese doesn’t have a word for grandchildren, which is correct, neputijiet being merely an Italian loan word brought in to fill the gap, transposing at the same time Italian’s lack of distinction between grandchildren and nephews and nieces.

Generations of grandparents younger than my own began to use the word il-grandchildren. While it sounds funny, and perhaps even affected, I can see what makes them do it. The relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren is a very special one, particularly in these times when so many people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s find themselves bereft of the pleasure of grandchildren, or perhaps with just one or two, because their own children are not having any, or having just the odd few when in their late 30s and early 40s. The relationship between Maltese people and their grandchildren has changed over the years. It has become one that merits special vocabulary, which it clearly was not in the past. And so the English word has been plucked out by some and transposed into the Maltese language.

So on the one hand, we have the vast majority of the population who don’t know that English has a word for grandchildren, and insist on speaking about “my nephews and nieces”. And on the other hand, we have a small minority who refer with determined pride to il-grandchildren taghna.

* * *

When we were in primary school, working our way through First Aid in English, a blue book with a white cross on it as I recall, we were made to chant out: “I before E except after C.” “How do you spell ‘niece’, boys and girls?” “N-I-E-C-E.” “How do you spell ‘ceiling’?” “C-E-I-L-I-N-G.”

I doubt that there is anyone my age who went to the sort of school I went to, and who puts I before an E except after C. I bet we’re all still whispering the chant over our keyboards as we come up against “piece” and “ceiling”. Back then, they taught us how to spell “niece”. Now, I’m afraid, they have to teach people what it means.

* * *

Some people I know stopped reading the rent reform Q & A booklet because it was too painful. I have to confess to being one of them. The very first question is enough to make you wince: “Will everybody be impacted by the Rent Reforms?”

Impacted? Impacted? How about affected? And why are the words “rent reforms” given the proper noun treatment with those capital letters? Proper nouns – remember them? First Aid in English made sure in primary school that I would never forget. Forget the capital letters – why is rent reform written in the plural as rent reforms? And is the translator – who, heaven forfend, is probably a lawyer – incapable of making the less than fine distinction between rent reform and reform of the rent laws? Landlords reform rents, usually upwards.

This is an official government document we’re talking about, part of a bilingual public information campaign. Those who are most likely to be reading the English version, rather than the Maltese, are the people who speak better English than Maltese. Yet the minute they come across something like “impacted” instead of “affected” or “nephew” used for “grandson” they are going to stop reading, because those errors undermine the perceived reliability of the information.

Repeat after me again: grandparents have grandchildren. Grandparents have grandchildren.