As an ex-teacher and author of 40 years standing, I don’t agree at all with what Andrew Saliba wrote in his article ‘A tale of two different languages’, but I do agree with Joe Friggieri that we should retain the English spelling for nouns which have not yet been conjugated into verbs.

Words like washing machine, sparking plugs, air conditioner, etc. should be left in their original language since we have no equivalent in Maltese and written in italics or between inverted commas.

That’s as far as the written language is concerned. On the other hand, teachers of English and Maltese must stress that one must not speak a mixture of both languages, as is often done by speakers on TV.

These people should know better and speak good Maltese or good English.

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