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Arnold Cassola: Malta: people, toponymy, language (4th century BC-1600), The Farsons Foundation, 185pp.

This book is a collection of articles by Arnold Cassola, some already published, most studies of our language as it appears in published word lists, portulans (manuals of sailing directions for use by navigators) and maps before 1600.

Some of the people described as Maltese had surnames never found in Malta today- Paul Xuereb

However, the longest and certainly most accessible to the common reader is a study of Maltese who emigrated to Trapani, in north-western Sicily, worked, got married and died there.

This study, limited to the 15th century, is based on research in Trapani’s notarial archives. It provides a variety of information about these Maltese, their industry and their relations with the Trapanese.

In his introduction, the author, not only an academic but also a politician, contrasts the way in which Maltese were made welcome in Trapani and allowed to make an honest living there, to what he calls “the xenophobic venom [in Malta today] against those foreigners who look towards our country as a safe haven from suffering and all sorts of atrocities”.

Cassola has established that there was a sizeable community of Maltese living inTrapani towards that century, and thinks the main reason why a good number of Maltese settled in that city was that at the time Malta was going through a bad economic phase, while Trapani, the closest Sicilian harbour to Spain, had supplanted Messina as acommercial centre.

Enterprising Maltese who found no scope for their talents or energy in their country found some of the desired opportunities in this seaport. They got on despite being foreigners, a fact acknowledged; in all the formal deeds into which they entered they are described as ‘Maltensis’.

The Maltese in Trapani could earn their living as muleteers or sailors, but some became owners of houses and vineyards, the latter a reminder that the area aroundTrapani is famous for its vineyards.

Interestingly, a certain Paulus Charcugi, Maltese, received as a gift two Saracen slaves who he was meant to use in an attempt to ransom the donor’s husband, then a slave in Barbary.

Some of the people described as Maltese had surnames never found in Malta today, like Charcugi or Buzangeri, others are called by their first name followed by ‘Maltensis’, while ‘Rogerius de Tabono’ is neither ‘Tabone’ nor ‘Tabona’, familiar surnames in today’s Malta.

Two chapters examine the Maltese words, mainly place-names, used in three portulans produced in Italy between 1296 and 1490, and in a 1572 map published in Porcacchi’s successful book, Le isole più famose del mondo, respectively.

The 1296 portulan Compasso da Navegare [sic] in its description of the Maltese Isles lists 13 Maltese place-names or landmarks, some of them, like ‘castello’ or ‘isolecta’ (isoletta) clearly Italian, while others are also clearly not: names like ‘gala’ (qala) or ‘Marza Mosecto’ (today’s Marsamxett).

The islet ‘La Pevere ‘– old Italian for ‘pepper’ – is the name it uses for what subsequently became ‘Filfla’. In fact the 15th century portulan Chompasso de tuta la starea della marina calls the islet Furfur vel Pevere, showing a transitional phase in the name.

These two portulans and the 1490 portulan by Bernardino Rizo are described as important by Cassola because “they can safely date certain Maltese place-names, provide alternative names for others oreven name places hitherto unrecordedelsewhere”.

The chapter on the 1572 map, produced by Girolamo Porro, lists the map’s place- names in parallel with those used by G .F. Abela in the map published in his important Della descrittione di Malta (1647) and discusses the names, making good use ofGodfrey Wettinger’s seminal Place names of the Maltese Islands ca. 1300-1800 (2000).

The common reader now has access to these stimulating papers published first a couple of decades ago. They will also appreciate the last part of the Porro article in which Cassola says that the map “can serve as a reliable checkpoint with regard to the spread of religious devotion [in the Maltese islands] around the latter part of the 16th century”.

The comments given on the Maltese language by 16th century visitors to Malta, and the Maltese word-list given by the German visitor Hieronymus Megiser who came to Malta in 1588 are the subject of two more chapters, both of which, again, first came out a few decades ago.

Fazello (1558) describes the language spoken by the Maltese as ‘Saracenico’. If he meant a form of Arabic, he would have been quite right.

On the other hand, Quintinus, in the first ever independent work devoted to Malta (1536), speaks of the ‘African’ nature of the language, and mentions Punic specifically, a statement followed by Tebaldi (1566) and other 16th century writers like Viperano who wrote a book about the Great Siege in 1567 and Porcacchi (1572), while the Frenchman Thevet (1575) wrote that the Maltese spoke a Moorish tongue as well as a corrupt Greek dialect, the latter assertion being very odd and not easily accepted.

The supposedly Punic origin of Maltese was to bedevil discussion about our language for centuries.

Other visitors were more knowledgeable. Giovanni Battista Leoni (1582) says quite bluntly that the Maltese spoke Arabic, and the German Samuel Kiechel, who came to Malta in 1585, speaks of “Moorish or Arabic”.

Strangely enough, Heironymus Megiser, who was greatly interested in comparative languages, is not clear-cut in his description, and speaks of “Saracen, Moorish or Carthaginian or ‘lingua punica’ which is a kind of Arabic”, showing himself somewhat confused.

On the other hand, Megiser made himself very useful in his Propugnaculum Europae (three editions, 1606, 1610 and 1611) by giving a list of 121 words in Maltese.

Cassola admits that the list includes misprints, and thinks the orthography “could actually be transcribing sounds which were possibly reproduced by a single informant”.

The list in the 1611 edition has been edited by the contemporary scholar William Cowan, and Cassola provides useful comments on many of Cowan’s amendments to Megiser.

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