The quasi-inane controversy over the writing of ewro or euro is further evidence of the warped perception several of our nationals have of their native language and its historical, morphological and etymological roots.

And, of course, it also betrays the level of superficiality at which Maltese has been, and is being, taught in our educational institutions. It's as if it were any other subject with no connection to our very origins.

We are actually a nation of mixed origins and so is our language. Our ethnic mixture is such that it is possible, even probable, that, as Nerik Mizzi said in October 1946 at the GWU premises in Valletta, the language we speak is the only characteristic that makes us Maltese.

What we have been reading in the past two months or so betrays the mixture of amateurism, snobbishness, prejudiced colonial servilism, and, to a large extent, a presumptuous attitude, generally the hallmark of mediocrity, that everyone knows everything about everything.

When the translation of the EU acquis came around I repeatedly asked: Why is there no linguist on the commission in charge of the project? I was never given an answer.

The end result was a quasi-idiotic translation that massacres the language in all its aspects. And yet, those involved are still around, often pontificating on how Maltese is to be written.

We then had a repeat performance in the translation of the EU Constitution. The document went through three revisions, and yet even the last one does not make the grade.

Language is to be left to the linguists; technical matters are the domain of technical people.

This, in a nutshell, is the core of the ewro/euro problem.

It is not the competence of a linguist to decide whether Malta should adopt the euro or not. That falls within the brief of economists, and of politicians acting on the advice of economists.

But whether to write, in Maltese, ewro or euro is the competence of language scholars, and not of dilettantes (or even of authors of literary importance) who do not have a scientific knowledge of the language or of the big guns at the European Central Bank.

The argument has been bandied around that little can be done to reverse the decision taken to use euro in legal texts.

Apart from the fact that the Kunsill tal-Malti, empowered by legislation to decide on linguistic matters, had come to an agreement with Government that euro was to be used only for legal texts, meaning legislative texts, and Government's statement that it would encourage the use of ewro for all other purposes, it is apt to observe that one of the pillars of the EU concept is unity in diversity.

It never crossed the collective mind of the founding fathers of Europe and their several successors to discard the myriad of national, regional and local customs, ways of life, cultures, languages, dialects, etc.

The EU, in actual fact, finances the Bureau for Lesser Used Languages to encourage their use and in cases where they have been lost, their revival. Catalan is one example; so are Gaelic and Welsh, to name a few. Maltese does not qualify for financing because it is a national language.

Europe is based on multi-culturalism, and language, even dialectal differences, are very much a constituent part of this concept.

That should be the point of departure for any discussion, even at EU level, on whether to use an "imposed" euro or to use the Maltese native ewro, which is the logical phonetic way of writing the word on the pattern of Ewropa, ewtanasja, ewkaristija, ewfemizmu, etc. Even the Arabic waw, used both for the letter w and for the conjunction u in Arabic, has had to submit itself to this Maltese phonetic rule.

The argument is buttressed by the fact that you just cannot tell a people to change their way of pronouncing and writing their language in a non-scientific way that is not based on their native morphological and phonetic systems.

In the case of Maltese these systems have evolved over some ten or 11 centuries since when the Arabs conquered Malta in 870 AD and consolidated their presence in the mid-11th century.

Whether we place the actual arabisation of Malta and Gozo in the late ninth century, or whether we opt for the mid-11th century theory, the fact is that the Siculo-Arabs of medieval Sicily brought to the island their Maghrebi dialect which lies at the very basis of Maltese.

And if we were to accept the view, as, in my view, we should, that the 11th century influx of Siculo-Arabs brought with it the Arabic and the Siculo-Arabic spoken at the time both by the colonising Arabs and by their mainly Christian Sicilian slaves, then we may safely conclude that, in any case, Arabic is at the basis of our language system.

The Siculo-Arabic element laid the basis for the rendering into Maltese words of Sicilian and, later, Italian origin. And when, many centuries later, English made its presence, the system devised by the people had already been long established and words of Anglo-Saxon origin followed suit. The unwritten Malti tal-kcina served its noble purpose of preserving the language and its phonetic rules.

These facts have to be respected if we are to have a modicum of national self-respect. Which means that we cannot, for example, renounce our quasi-phonetic system which calls for uniform pronunciation of consonants and vowels subject only to phonetic rules and not to arbitrary aberrations such as those imposed by ECB or Brussels dictats.

Besides, if every EU member state has the right to place the "national" symbols it chooses on the obverse of its coins, why should it not have the right to imprint its own orthographically correct version of the word euro, in our case ewro, on the reverse?

Another consideration arising out of this unfortunate controversy concerns the rendering of loan words (not a happy term, Aquilina used to say) in Maltese.

The argument was treated very well by Professor Albert Borg in his reply of February 5 to the badly conceived editorial this paper carried the previous Sunday.

Words of Italian origin, of which the major part of the corpus of our vocabulary is made up, are invariably adopted phonetically by Maltese, both languages having, in the main, similar phonetic systems.

Why should this not apply, mutatis mutandis, to those loan words of Anglo-Saxon origin which can conform to our phonetic system?

I would not write, and I say with some emphasis, tape recorder, aircraft carrier and such words, using Maltese orthography. Would not rikkieb id-diski for disk jockey, or naddaf bil-vakwu for vacuum cleaner be as ridiculous as the infamous igsma tal-pariri for advisory bodies?

But there is nothing wrong, in fact it is perfectly correct to write dizil, kowc, futbol, gowler, baskitbol etc. I would not, today, use magna tal-hasil for washing machine (except perhaps in a literary text) because the Maltese nominal phrase, so common when the contraption was introduced in Malta some 50 years ago, has long been discarded for the English phrase.

Neither will I write mitjar, the Saydon coinage that never took off and is unheard on people's lips, besides not even being morphologically correct.

Now that we have an official body, the Kunsill tal-Malti, that is recognised by law as the body that has the last say on linguistic matters, let that body go for a scientific exercise to discuss anything that still needs to be discussed on some varying opinions regarding a few orthographic problems.

And let Government and all its institutions abide by the law.

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