I never thought I'd enter the debate about the keeping or doing away with the gh and the h. I teach many Arabic-speaking students who have just landed in my Special Education classes (intensive English literacy and numeracy) straight from an Intensive (English) Language Centre into a mainstream high school. Therefore I'm surrounded by various Arabic dialects all the time, and am fascinated by similarities or divergence between spoken Maltese and any of these dialects of Arabic.

For Professor Albert Borg's (The Sunday Times, April 2) and other contributors' information, I was brought up in Mgarr (Malta), surrounded by elderly relatives who spoke a dialect not much different from some of the ones I listen to every day. I can also note, as Professor Borg did in his dissertation, as he describes, that quite frequently the Arabic phonemic roots have been lost in contemporary Maltese.

My dilemma is, as it would be for many others, I presume, how to reconcile the dropping of the gh and h and still obtain the semantics of phrases such as, "Hu u huh", which would make, probably, the strict adherence to the morphological rules imperative.

Also, using the same logic that Maltese babies learning Maltese will not think Arabic, or English or Italian, but Maltese, so do English babies, when they learn English as their mother tongue. Yet, English as a written language is not logical or in keeping with English phonetics; at least, not for a good 15 to 20 per cent of the language. It is, however, in keeping with the historic development of English and other living languages including Maltese, and the absorption of words and concepts from around its geographical boundaries and successive ruling and political, sometimes academic influences.

It is good that the debate has surfaced in the media, as it gives a wider audience the chance to see various points of view about the language which identifies us.

And while academics cannot prescribe the language which the masses will speak, their description and explanations of morphological importance will help the learner of the written language make sense of the orthography.