Gh and h in Maltese

I would be failing in courtesy to Mr Mario Serracino-Inglott (The Sunday Times, March 26) if I were not to try and remove the grounds for his "shock" and alleviate his anxiety by "clearing up... something so untoward" and thereby also exculpating "all the other Maltese writers, academics, council members (of which council?), presidents and what not, who normally come out to defend our language" and who presumably failed to rally to its defence "against the many local traitors who... seem to spring up to spread their venom about our identity".

It was Dr Ragonesi (February 19) who, in the context of trying to make a case against my defence of the principle used by our orthography, whereby new Maltese words loaned from English (and indeed from other sources) are written according to the rules for Maltese spelling, mentioned for good measure, my proposal, contained in a dissertation presented over 30 years ago, to dispense with the symbols gh and h.

It seems he failed to realise the contradiction, since this proposal, viewed from a historical perspective, involves the recognition that Maltese has moved further away from its Arabic roots, to become, ironically for him, more like the European languages which have influenced our own language in its development.

Historically, Maltese has unfortunately often been "promoted" not for its own sake, but as a means to a very different end, namely that of either (somehow) facilitating the teaching and learning of Italian or of English. In my scientific work on our language, I have chosen a different starting point, namely the so-called synchronic method.

In effect this involves trying to provide the answer to an apparently simple question: What is it that the baby learning Maltese as its mother tongue has to acquire to become a native speaker of the language?

Many lifetimes of dedicated work will not suffice for a linguist to attempt to answer that question, but at least this much is clear: in principle, the baby will not have to acquire either Arabic or Italian or English to achieve its task.

Faithfulness to this methodology frees the linguist from any hidden agenda, because one's loyalty is only to the native speaker of the language under study: there is no compulsion to promote one linguistic influence over another. In my work of 30 years ago, I identify the main principles underlying our orthographic system.

Even though the definite article in Maltese involves the consonant "l" for instance, the orthography represents its assimilation to a following so-called "sun letter", e.g. ix-xemx, it-tiben, etc. This is the phonetic principle at work: one merely writes as one speaks. Another important principle of representation is the phonemic one: when the verb kiteb is written with a final "b" for instance, one is reproducing not an actual sound (the spoken reality in fact is a "p") but a mental image recoverable from the speaker's native knowledge (e.g. a related form would be kitbu, where the "b" sound reappears).

It is a completely different matter when it comes to the written symbols gh and h which correspond to different spoken sounds, depending on the context: to a "j" sound in tieghem and fiehem, to "h" in taghha, etc. The orthography retains them to preserve the original morphological pattern found in Arabic, even though in the course of its development, Maltese has lost the speech sounds they originally represented. (There are some other details which would have to be mentioned in a more technical discussion, but in general this would not be an unfair account.)

On the other hand, our system has no difficulty with the writing of verbs such as beka or rema or even ra, which originally also had three so called "consonant roots", because in Arabic these verbs were already considered as "weak" (in other words, as lacking a "normal" triconsonantal root). Unlike the application of the phonetic and phonemic principles, the retention of gh and h involves going beyond the Maltese speaker's native knowledge to a situation obtaining in another language, namely Arabic.

Should a scientist be labelled a traitor for pointing out inconsistencies like this in a social group's "received knowledge"? It is one thing to bring such matters out into the open and quite another to implement changes unilaterally as several of our well-known and revered scholars of the language have felt free to do in their published work.

Mr Serracino-Inglott in fact will find it impossible to find examples of my work where I use a spelling system different from the official orthography, apart from one or two pages which I give by way of a sample in a dissertation which has accumulated the dust of 30 years.

Where is the treachery, or the poisonous threat to "our identity"? Or is it the comfortable but precarious position of self-appointed custodians of a myth that is challenged? Why should the foundations of the Institute of Linguistics or of the National Council for the Maltese Language shake in trepidation?

But maybe Mr Serracino-Inglott would rather deny me my right to think...