“Whom am I speaking to,” asked the voice at the other end. “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong number: nobody I know says ‘whom’,” replied the man on this end, while he put the phone receiver down.

His reason for doing so: all the people he knew said ‘who’, rather than ‘whom’.

Sometimes I feel as lost as the man on the phone. All the people I know say publiku, republika and eletriku, yet all the powers that be, whether official or grammatical, insist on writing pubbliku, repubblika and elettriku.

Pubbliku and publiku have a different sound from each other, as do repubblika and republika and elettriku and eletriku.

The trouble with us Maltese is that we know so many languages that we end up writing these words like they were in Italian, where they have double consonants, then proceed to read them as if they were in English, where double bs in words like ‘bubbly’ and ‘wobbly’ are read like Maltese or Italian single bs.

So we wrongly end up reading a Maltese double b as if it were a single b. But ‘bbl’ in Maltese has a different sound from a ‘bl’. Qabblu and qablu are differently pronounced. Abbli does not rhyme with qabli. Therefore, pubbliku (which nobody says) and publiku (as pronounced by all the people I know) have a different sound and therefore different spelling.

Do not cite the case of ħabbtu and ħabtu. Yes, they are pronounced the same but that’s only because the b is not followed by a liquid consonant like r.

Wrongly spelt repubblika has even crept into our national coat of arms, becoming arguably the most internationally-visible word in the Maltese language.

So, please, let us have rules that are rightly reliable, rather than wobbly ones that change from the usual just for a handful of words.

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