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.