I refer to the recent learned contributions by Joseph Friggieri and Henry Frendo on the subject of pidgin Maltese and would like to offer my modest support, although they do not need it.

In my youth, I studied Maltese under Ġorġ Pisani, Fr Joseph Delia and Joseph Aquilina.

I can still remember learning that the Maltese language has a Semitic structure as well as a largely Romance vocabulary. This has been acquired over centuries and has been well assimilated.

I have nothing against necessary neologisms but it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel and try to re-absorb new words from English when we had already absorbed them through Italian centuries ago, apart from the fact that Italian words fit in better and have gender and number as in Maltese. Anglo-Saxon and German words remain alien, like a foreign body.

What irritates me a lot is that some of the people who seem to be ruling the roost in Maltese appear to have not only a very limited knowledge of English but also an extremely poor knowledge – verging on illiteracy – of Italian.

Translating chemistry as kemistrija is funny enough when we have had kimika for centuries. On TV we have recently been having riċediv instead of reċidiv, refuġjat instead of rifuġjat and affettwat instead of effettwat, to mention but a few examples.

Aquilina, I am sure, would be turning in his grave.

A particularly obnoxious neologism we also hear on TV – this time not due to illiteracy in Italian – is xabbaturi. Aquilina gives xabbat or Alpinista, which sounds much kinder on the ear.