The language question (1)

Your choice of leader title last Sunday ("The language question") is unfortunate, harking back as it does to the divisive controversy rampant in the early decades of the last century. The resolution of that issue is now enshrined constitutionally and it would be unwise, retrograde and insensitive to attempt to open it up again, especially now that besides its status as national and official language of Malta, Maltese is also an official language of the EU.

Most of the problems referred to by your leader betray an unwillingness, or a reluctance, to come to terms with Maltese as an ancient language, which because of changed historical, social and political realities is facing the challenge to develop quickly into a vehicle adequate enough to embody and express the contemporary realities of our nation.

One has to carefully distinguish Modern Standard Maltese from what I have been calling Mixed Maltese English. "Kelli nixtri kuker u frigg ghall-flett" is an example of standard Maltese usage, reflecting our way of life in the third millennium. While the form kuker seems well established, together with its Maltese plural kukers, the form frigg (plural friggijiet) has a variant, frig (plural frigis).

Over time, one of these variants will probably vanish (as I indicated last week in another section of the press), leaving one standard form. More recent loans tend to raise eyebrows simply because the passage of time has not yet dulled their impact and the process of integration is still fresh in people's minds, familiar as they would be, to a greater or lesser extent, with the English written form. One example would be: "Iccekkjajt il-maws ghax il-kompjuter mhux qed jahdem sew".

On the other hand, "Tell him to work harder ta, ghax taf kemm hu ghazzien!" for instance, or "So much rain! They were saying il-wipers (or possibly, "il-wajpers") ma kinux qed ilehhqu!", would be instances of mixed Maltese English which it would be desirable to avoid.

If this is the sort of usage intended by your leader ("...a hotch-potch of anglicisms and arbitrarily coined words and expressions which should make the true lovers of the Maltese language recoil in horror"), then we could be in agreement. It would be a different matter altogether however if Modern Standard Maltese were to be the object of your remark involving "the assimilation of foreign words" which "should not mean its degeneration", and in respect of which, it seems, you urge "our teachers, schools and other educational institutions" to "ensure correct usage of the language".

If kuker, frigg, flett, maws, kompjuter, iccekkjajt, etc. were not truly part of Standard Maltese, then on the written level, practically every other word in our writing would have to be enclosed within inverted commas or graphically distinguished in some other way (italics, for instance), not to mention the problem of representing, within the same word, grammatical devices such as the inflectional suffix '-jajt' and the doubling (or lengthening) of the initial consonant, a well-established feature in the assimilation of such loan verbs (thus, "ichcheckckjajt"?).

But the more worrying impact would surely be on our attempt to speak Maltese in such a way as to avoid its "degeneration". So should one avoid iccekkjajt and try to say something like 'qghadt nifli bir-reqqa', or should we correct maws to 'ghodda elettronika li tmexxiha fuq mejda biex thaddem il-kompjuter'? What is so terrible about writing new words in Maltese using its well established orthographic rules?

Rather than recoiling in horror, "true lovers of Maltese" should jump for joy that their language can so easily grow and adapt itself to changed circumstances. That is what it has been doing at least since the Middle Ages: but maybe there are those who would much rather see it retreat into extinction!