Malta has no language question. That was a time long past, to which no one wants to return. What it certainly has is a language about which many questions are asked, which, after all, is only natural considering that Maltese is a living tongue and needs to develop ways and means to give expression to new ideas that mushroom around us every day. The very fact that such an issue as the correct writing of ewro/euro raised so much interest in the press is a healthy sign that people really do care about their language.

True, Maltese is spoken by a relative handful of people and it has difficulties in coping with influences from other languages, particularly English. But, then, which language is immune from these influences? French, to mention one, itself a great language, is periodically regulated by the issue of lists of words to counter neologisms but, in fact, no one knows the effect of such measures among the public. So let us put our difficulties in perspective and look closely at whether we have more to gain by revisiting certain basic rules rather than by simply shooting from the hip at moving targets which are too many to be dealt with individually with any degree of success.

Maltese/English

Comparisons between Maltese and English may seem ludicrous but there is an uncanny historical resemblance in their early development, which may give Maltese scholars food for thought and even directions on how best to navigate between the Scylla of stultifying purism and the Charybdis of mindless acceptance of neologisms.

Both Maltese and English are a fusion of two families of languages. Where Maltese is basically Semitic, English is Anglo-Saxon, and both "absorb a large number of Romance and other loan-words expressing new ideas and requirements".1 As history would have it, this linguistic process began practically at the same time. With English, it started with the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and, with Maltese, with the Norman conquest of Malta in 1091.

The comparison ends there. It is, however, interesting to point out that by 1400, England had produced two great poets who lived in the same period, roughly between 1330 and 1400. One was William Langland (Piers Plowman) and, the other, Goeffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), who broadly signalled the parting of the ways and the one the English language was to take. Langland's work, written in Old English, today interests mostly the specialist. Chaucer's, however, written in the King's English containing large amounts of Romance loanwords, although written over 500 years ago, still enjoys wide readership.

Although English seems to assimilate uncontrollably and effortlessly words from all over the world, particularly, because of the extent of the former British Empire, there were always those who thought that certain restraints should be exercised. Of these, I have always admired the brothers Fowler and their work The King's English.2 The authors start by saying that a good writer "should endeavour... to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid". They further translate this general principle into five practical rules in the domain of vocabulary:

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.

Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.

Prefer the short word to the long.

Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.3

The last rule is also the fifth in the order of merit and the authors consider it a freak that some writers should introduce their books with a Foreword rather than with a Preface. They contend that Foreword is (or may be) Saxon, but Preface is English and "we want to write English, not Saxon".

To my mind, these are words of wisdom that eminently apply, mutatis mutandis, to Maltese, as hybrid a language as English.

Approaches

Of course, there is more than one way to skin a cat. The following ideas on how to tackle some of the linguistic difficulties we face are just suggestions and are derived from personal observation.

For the sake of organisation, I would divide the tackling of difficulties into short-term, medium-term and long-term targets without being too strict about it. So, flexibility should always be the name of the game.

In the short term, I would include those measures that could be introduced simply by a decision of the authority concerned - cabinet, local council, board, committee, regulatory bodies, companies, etc. Some matters that could easily be decided are:

- letterheads on Government stationery should only be in Maltese. Our language is written in Latin script so that even those who do not understand it can easily copy out the address in replying. This, of course, should be emulated by businesses;

- answering the telephone in offices and businesses should, in the first instance, be in Maltese. If the caller is unable to speak the language, then, of course, another language, usually English, should be used. A major offender in this regard is Maltacom's directory enquiry service. To be sure, the attendants' manners are impeccable. They always greet you with a pleasant "Good morning" and to a "Grazzi" they always reply "You are welcome". But they also make Maltese feel as if they were in a foreign country. How about "Bongu" and "M'hemmx imniex!"? Of course, Maltacom is not the only culprit. This notwithstanding, I commend Maltacom for giving priority to Maltese over English in its instructions for paying bills;

- placenames should be written in Maltese. In large measure this is done but in some cases, such as, St Julian's and St Paul's Bay, this practice seems to stick around. Indeed, I do not think it is even legal to write the names in English. The law establishing the local councils stipulates that the Maltese version is the only legal one; and

- commemorative plaques: these are usually addressed to the Maltese public and it is absurd that they should be written in any other language but Maltese. One recent instance is that of a main bank recording the opening of its headquarters. I can understand the logic of hitting many birds with one stone but respect for the language of the majority of clients should be paramount. Foreigners could not care less by whom and when the bank was inaugurated. Ironically, this comes from a concern which promptly accepted ewro, the Maltese spelling, in its advertising material on TV, a decision which may well be a trail-blazer for the use of the word.

These shortcomings, if corrected, could give a much needed linguistic facelift to Malta in a short time.

Medium term

Here I would like to list just one issue simply because it is not usually addressed in the press and not because it is the only one that needs tackling. The Taghrif fuq il-Kitba Maltija (1924) should be authoritatively revisited with a view to simplifying what could be simplified without doing major violence to orthographical rules. One has to acknowledge that L-Akkademja has issued two updates to clarify certain orthographical difficulties - one, in the review Il-Malti of January/June 1984, and, another, of October 1992, both of which dealing mainly with loan-words and how they should be written in Maltese.

In these two updates, there is already an attempt at simplification even at the expense of etymological structure and this is rightly done in the name of practicality. This process should be continued in earnest so that a new, revised Taghrif could be issued without undue delay. Indeed, I feel that the updates should also be revised. As they are, there are rules which are very difficult, if not impossible, for 16-year old school leavers to follow.

Some points which could fruitfully be pursued are:

- the rule that a word ending in a vowel should not be followed by one beginning with a vowel is already done away with in many cases. In fact, the first update mentioned above deals largely with this and extends the exceptions even further. When we can write without any bother jiena u inti, it becomes questionable if the rule is really necessary; and

- we write ta' l-avukat/tal-bajjad. Perhaps, uniformly writing tal- plus the noun, or leaving it optional, could settle the matter.4

In our efforts to protect Maltese from tasteless loanwords, which are to be commended, we tend to lose sight of what, to my mind, is more important. It is the abomination of translating literally English idioms into Maltese, thus rendering them meaningless because they are alien to our culture. I have heard in a sports newscast the expression "irmew ix-xugaman", which is a literal translation of "they threw in the towel". Are you smiling? It was once written that the Maltese are ridiculously English. Who can doubt that?

Long term

An electronic dictionary is in the pipeline. One would expect that this new work would be user-friendly not only technically but also substantively in that it would help the user, without much ado, to find the correct writing of any specific word in any grammatical context.

The system used by lexicographers thus far, particularly, in the case of verbs, is to give the stem and the radicals, the imperative, the imperfect and the past participle. But Maltese, precisely because of its silent consonants (gh, h), needs more ample orthographical information, even before the definition of the listed words, so that the user does not have to search for pages on end to find the right spelling of the word, if that indeed happens to be given.

Love story

In my long years at the United Nations, I learned to deepen my love for Maltese because I saw other people making heroic efforts for their national languages. The UN has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Maltese delegates were lucky because, English being the language of the administration, they reported in that language without the need of translation. But what about the Italian, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Polish, Greek and other delegates whose countries did not have any of the UN languages as their official language?

When these officers sat down to prepare their reports, they had first to spend endless hours grappling with translations. But they did it gladly and willingly because they understood that their national language, the most important element of their mental make-up, was worth their effort.

The way we treat our language tells me that our love affair with it is not the most ardent feeling in the hearts of many Maltese.

References

1. Joseph Aquilina, Teach Yourself Maltese (Preface), English Universities Press Ltd, 1965.

2. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, The King's English , third edition, OUP, 1930, followed by several reprints at least up to 1958.

3. Ibid. p. 11 ff..

4. Mgr Lawrence Cachia: Grammatika Gdida tal-Malti (1994). The author seems to anticipate this change. In the preface, he writes tal-ilsien (not ta' l-ilsien) and tal-Akkademja (not ta' l-Akkademja). I stand to be corrected but I do not think l-Akkademja tal-Malti has ever approved this change.