With the choice of title 'The politics of spelling' (The Sunday Times, September 7) it is clear that thankfully Prof. Peter Serracino Inglott is now writing about the same subject affected by the recent Decisions of the National Council for the Maltese Language, namely not the language itself but its orthographic system.
In its deliberations over a number of years, the Bord dwar l-Ilsien Malti set up by the Minister of Education under three different administrations to present a report about the setting up of some sort of language authority for Maltese opted very deliberately to avoid a model which would work by imposition.
Instead, it recommended a structure which, set up by the will of the representatives of the people in Parliament and funded by the State, would provide a nationally recognised focal point while roping in as much as possible the collective effort of all those bodies which had the development and continued growth of Maltese at heart.
The administration, which finally acted upon the report of the board, presented a project in Parliament ensured the widest possible participation at the highest level of the National Council's structures and at the same time provided the required space for the input of language experts on a technical level. The board's recommendation to avoid imposition was given form in the law by excluding penalties, thereby endorsing the expressed aim of moving by conviction.
It is interesting and very telling that this project became law through the consensus of both sides of the House. The members of the council are happy to note that this political consensus has in fact been translated into widespread acceptance of the council's work, not least because of the scrupulous attention it gave to ensuring the widest possible level of consultation in its action.
It is a source of great satisfaction to the council that its calls for partici-pation in the public debate about Maltese and its orthography have had such an encouraging response and people now feel this is a project in which they are taking an active part.
Moreover, the council's decisions are considered serious and authoritative, as can be seen from the fact that, in spite of a three-year moratorium, the orthographic changes announced less than two months ago have already been adopted by all publishers, by the Maltese-language media, by EU translators, and by important agents in the educational field such as Matsec, not to mention that Microsoft's forthcoming Maltese spellchecker has also incorporated them. Ironically, these results have been obtained without the help of the coercive methods given such prominence by Prof. Serracino Inglott.
Regarding apprehension about decisions on borrowings from English, it would seem obvious that anyone writing futbol and lekċer in an essay supposedly written in English is making a mistake in English spelling. The council has no brief and no desire to pronounce itself on English spelling.
The point is that Maltese as a living language grows not only by developing from Arabic and borrowing from Romance, but also by borrowing from English. Just as there was a popular demand for it to decide about orthographic variants, there is also a widely expressed wish for some standardisation to be introduced in the writing of that part of Maltese originally borrowed from English.