I refer to the article ‘De Valette or de la Valette?’ (The Sunday Times, January 13) where Prof. Denis De Lucca states that members of the Valette family in the 16th and 17th centuries used both the ‘de’ and ‘de la’ preceding their surname, implying that arguing about the Grand Master’s name is really unnecessary.

I would argue there must be a very valid motive behind such use and that the intertwined linguistic and historical backdrop to the change is being very sadly missed.

Linguistically, the issue is whether we should refer to the Grand Master by his Latinised official name, de Vallette, where Latin feminine nouns do not have any definite article other than the sporadic illa (that) from which la evolved, or by the name deriving from his Provençal dialect, or later still French language, de la Valette.

The frequently mentioned first name Jehan is the Occitan equivalent of the French Jean. Like the Latin Johannes or Iohan, it is often associated with the family name ‘de Valette’. Oc is spoken in the Languedoc area where Jehan/Johannes de Vallette/a, as most signatures evince, was born around 1494. Incidentally, this date was only some eight years after the legal incorporation of Provence into the French realm in 1486. An interesting historical development occurred in 1539 when de Vallette was some 45 years old and already in Malta. Francis I, seeing the wide linguistic disparity in the use of various Romance and Germanic languages in France, enacted the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts which prescribed the use of standard French, mostly as spoken in northern France and Paris where the langues d’oui prevailed.

The edict made French the administrative, judicial and notarial language of the kingdom, substituting Latin with the aim of avoiding linguistic confusion. In one clause the edict actually stated: “We wish and command that judicial acts are made and written so clearly that there will neither be any ambiguity nor uncertainty nor possibility of ambiguity or uncertainty, nor cause to ask interpretation about them.”

It appears that reference to the Grand Master as ‘de la Valette’ started being made by others, not himself, in the 16th and 17th centuries, some time after the promulgation of the edict. It also seems likely that the date of letters sent from the Holy See in direct pontifical correspondence to Jean de la Vallette, with French first name and added article, were sent after he became Grand Master in 1557 unless he had any connections with the Vatican before that date. This was some 18 years after the Ordinance of which the Vatican must certainly have been aware.

One possible way of arriving at a historical conclusion on the proper spelling of the Grand Master’s full name is by compiling the user patterns of his Christian name with his family name, language, nature and date of document, and whether so referred to by himself, a family member or a third party. The juxtapositioning of a Christian forename (Jehan, Johannes, Iohan, Jean) with different forms of the family name (de Valette, de la Valette) could shed a light on the reasoning behind their joint use.

The specific signature used with particular languages bear considerable importance too. A similar study could be undertaken of where and when the more primary Jehan and the French Jean exist and with which respective family name, besides the time lapse before or after the Ordinance.

Even so, noting how a person holding so many linguistic capabilities would be expected to call himself or expect others to call him can form the basis of interesting research if based on the recorded effects the Ordinance had in Europe and locally.