Out of a sense of historical correctness, I have to reply to some comments made by my friend Anton Agius Muscat (The Sunday Times, August 22).

First of all, it is not correct to say that I have maintained "seven years of silence" regarding my most fruitful relationship with Professor Joseph Aquilina. I have been interviewed, I have spoken and I have written articles on the subject.

Secondly, I have to state that the title and sub-titles of the interview published on August 8, 2004, are not mine. That interview took place many, many months ago. I had the occasion to suggest some alterations, which I duly sent to Rigu Bovingdon.

When finally it was going to be published, the text could not be found at The Sunday Times and I e-mailed Bovingdon to send another copy, which he did.

I accessed my copy on the morning of Thursday, August 5, and immediately noted that this was Bovingdon's first draft. By that time the interview had already been printed.

I am satisfied with Agius Muscat's confirmation of Ninu Cremona's Tmissu xejn. Iccaqalqu xejn, or words to that intent. It was only a question of whether to use a literal or an idiomatic translation in rendering the words in English.

It is common knowledge that Cremona's system needed a degree of upgrading. One has only to mention the fact that neither in his Manual of Maltese Orthography and Grammar (1929) and in his two volumes of the Taghlim fuq il-Kitba Maltija (Book 1, 1935; Book 2, 1938) he does not discuss at all the Romance element in Maltese. And even when he revised the first edition of this grammar it seems that he did not feel that he should go into that branch of the language, in spite of his acknowledgement of the mixed nature of Maltese even before his production of the two publications I have mentioned (cf. X'inhu l-Malti Safi, 1925).

At no point did I ever intend to attribute to Cremona any "boastful" tendencies. Far from it! I remember him well enough when he asked me to proofread the final reprint of his revised grammar to be able to say that it could never cross my mind to make such an allegation. I would even say that it is a pity that his grammar, of course with some upgrading, is out of circulation.

But I would also reiterate that Dr Laferla's "request" to have Guzeppi Ebejer and Ganni Cilia, two experienced teachers, by Cremona's side when he was embarking on his Taghlim fuq il-Kitba Maltija was no request at all. It was a requisite decided upon by Laferla in the interest of schoolchildren.

As for Aquilina's relations with Cremona, I have heard so much from Aquilina himself that I would never put their sincere friendship in any doubt. So much so that Aquilina did not expound publicly even his very few differences from Cremona's morphological system during Cremona's lifetime out of his deep respect for this friendship.

For example, Aquilina retained that Maltese trilateral hollow verbs should follow the Arabic (Semitic) pattern of retaining the gemination of the middle radical consonant in the Second and Fifth Forms (mewwtu/tmewwtu, rawwmu/trawwmu, tejjbu/ttejjbu, etc. instead of the traditional mewtu/tmewtu, rawmu/trawmu, tejbu/ttejbu etc.).

This is clearly implied in his Ph.D. thesis of 1939 published under the name of The Structure of Maltese in 1959, and is later spelt out in a footnote in his Teach Yourself Maltese (1965).

The early papers and typescripts of his Maltese-English Dictionary, now at the University of Malta Library, follow the same morphological pattern.

But it was only after Ninu Cremona's death in January 1972 that he spoke publicly on the matter.

It took the Akkademja tal-Malti, on which Cremona exerted a considerably strong influence, more than ten years to accede to Erin Serracino Inglott's request to expound his thoughts on the Maltese lexical system, and that only after Cremona's death.

Yes, from a linguistic point of view, both Aquilina and Serracino Inglott did breath a sign of relief in 1972.

All this is history.

As for Mr John Consiglio's letter carried in the same issue of The Sunday Times, all I know is that at a certain stage in the compilation of his English-Maltese dictionary Professor Aquilina stopped dictating lists of words and phrases to be sent to Mr Consiglio.