Received spelling

The controversy about how to treat loanwords and "imports" from other languages into ours continues to rage strong without any consensus regarding a fixed policy emerging.

I am no philologist, linguistician, or any other sort of -ologist or -ician, and I will be the first to support the thesis that language is a living thing formed at grass roots and not dictated by some august body of intellectuals in their ivory tower. However, I must deplore a trend which of late appears to have crept in: nowadays, if there are various corruptions of a particular "imported" word in use, then the most massacred one seems to end up by becoming the official version.

For instance, the receipts issued by the Water Services Corporation bear, in the top left-hand corner, the strange device "Irċevuta". As far as I can recall, most people I know call a receipt a "riċevuta", not an "irċevuta". The latter pronunciation, I am reliably informed, is indeed utilised by that small sector of the population which (even in 2008) have remained mainly illiterate or nearly so.

But must we have it that way?

Some restraint appears to be called for, Għaqda tal-Malti please note. Otherwise, we will end up with schoolchildren being taught that in Maltese a mudguard is a "medgar", a bumper is a "vamper" and a reverse osmosis plant is a Reserve of Moses.