Further to Roderick Bovingdon’s letter (‘The Maltese language’, The Sunday Times of Malta, September 27), I am satisfied he is not “biased towards some kind of Semitic purification of Maltese to the detriment of our old established and very beneficial accretions from the non-Semitic linguistic world”.

However, I got a different im­pression since, in his article which appeared on September 6, Bovingdon states: “Irrespective of our traditional language source borrowings from Italian and English, superimposed onto the Semitic Arabic stratum, we must shed the overriding cloak of our long colonialist past and ack­nowledge that we are dealing Maltese, first and foremost.”

I do not need to go into the merits of the Semitic, Italian and British influences once again.

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