Matters for the users

Having read the letter by Amanda Mallia (April 19), I feel I should no longer resist saying to what a worrying and ridiculous extent this whole Maltesisation-of-English-words process has now evolved.

I love my birthright Maltese very dearly and - many of my many Maltese writer friends will bear witness. I have always gone out of my way to write and use it as correctly as possible in radio programmes and written work. But now it seems as if a few extremists have gone far too far with this approach of insisting (indeed imposing!) that English words that have been assimilated and absorbed into everyday Maltese use be written using Maltese spelling and word structuring. This is causing absolute havoc in the minds of schoolchildren, students, parents and even teachers, and it is about time we all returned to sanity.

I was not there to publicly air my views at the seminar held recently on this issue by those hard-working, clever and extremely nice people who sit on the Kunsill għall-Ilsien Malti. But what I would have said there is simply that with ours being factually a bilingual (indeed, I can also actually argue for our state of potential trilinguism!) society, it is inherently dangerous, and a situation which can factually instigate a dangerous backlash against well-written beautiful Maltese, for anyone to try to legislate for or impose such matters.

I have been told by an English academic friend of mine about a potentially-analogous situation which many English language departments of universities in the UK found themselves in, many years ago, when the rapidly increased influx of immigrants into the country speaking the Indian and Pakistani, West Indies, American and what-have-you versions of English, began to be reflected via increased numbers of such students in English schools and academic institutions. Dons and examiners faced the issue of whether users of such versions of English, in assignments, exam scripts, theses, etc. should be penalised because they were not writing "standard, correct English".

After serious debate, and much soul-searching, the outcome decision was that they should not.

Mutatis mutandis, would there be a right to sue any Maltese teacher or university examiner penalisingly marking the script of a student of Maltese who writes nurse and not nerse, yacht and not jot?

Maltese is an absolutely beautiful language and I love it dearly. Let all those of us who feel this way not end up impaled by this sentiment becoming an object of ridicule through any measures bordering on the altar of eccentricity (I believe the Maltese word safiżmu would fit that description, no?).

On a very practical level within such context, the writers of those junior school textbooks, to which Ms Mallia refers, have actually got it all wrong, simply because theirs is a dogmatic-didactic approach that does not prima facie seem to make allowance for the possibility that somebody who is writing a text in Maltese but spells "nurse", "blackboard", etc in their English spelling form could be writing just as correct Maltese. Why should the process of assimilation become exacerbated to the extent that so many saffisti seem to insist on imposing?

Of course, I don't share Ms Mallia's harking back to the use of italic (not "italics" Ms Mallia please, there is no such word as italics in English, italic being a style and, as such, a singular word) or within inverted commas, for such words. They are indeed potentially so numerous that almost a whole document could end up being treated in this way.

That said and done, let's all return to calm sanity and, after all, consider that language and writing are probably much more matters for the users than for those who seek to impose on the users.