The late Fr Peter Serracino Inglott had made a ‘prophecy’ in an interview with Alessandra Fiott (‘Opening a can of words’, The Sunday Times of Malta, August 10, 2008).
The bulk of an issue of The Malta Government Gazette at the time having been primarily about Maltese spelling, the learned professor and author of a book about language was asked if he sympathised “with those who reacted to the diktats of the Council for the Maltese Language with indignation, amusement or indifference”.
After dismissing the law “regulating the use of words” as “the most dismally absurd piece of legislation of the Mintoff days”, he held that severely to regulate language was “a defining characteristic of all authoritarian governments”. In support he refers to Victor Klemperer’s book The language of the Third Reich (Continuum, 2002) and to George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ of Big Brother in 1984 whereby language was the main weapon to control people’s minds. His fellow Oxonian, John Searle, would surely have labelled the so-called Council for the Maltese Language’s so-called ‘decisions’ as prescriptive.
Couched in legal jargon, these ‘decisions’ were taken by virtue of the power vested in this so-called ‘council’ by article 5(2) of a law enacted by the then Nationalist administration. So, Serracino Inglott indignantly asked: “Are the ‘decisions’ of the council analogous to those of a tribunal?” In other words, had a few local university lecturers from the same stable become high court judges against whom there was no appeal?
Writing another book in a ‘Maltese’ which offends one’s scholarly conscience becomes an off-putting chore
Did this mean that students taking Matsec “will be penalised for writing, say, skond (according to) and not skont, as the council decided we should write it?”
Yes, professor, it did. Ask teachers and parents who try to help out their children with homework.
Serracino Inglott then added poignantly: “Now let us suppose that there is a teacher of Maltese who might even, for all I know, have the stature of an Aquilina and that he feels it would violate his or her scholarly conscience to depart from spelling adopted by Aquilina in his dictionary. Will [then] Education Minister Dolores Cristina take disciplinary action against him or her?”
Could “a responsible publisher who passionately disagrees with the ‘council’ defy its ‘decisions’ with impunity? Surely this is an area in which even ‘soft law’ is inappropriate…”
It was certainly necessary for a language to have all its usages, even in spelling, if it was to maintain “at least a semblance of dignity”.
We had David Crystal’s empirical assertion to the effect that when English spelling standardised between the 16th and 18th century, it did so ‘bottom-up’ with “a consensus of usage gradually favouring some traditional spellings at the expense of others”. (Incidentally, English, the world’s leading literary language and means of communication, is not shackled by any such ‘council’.)
“So I roared with relief when I read that the council had not begrudged us, ordinary mortals, happy with the breadcrumbs dropped from its sumptuous table, the possibility on a few occasions of making our own choice between available options.
“The council had refrained from deciding on our behalf (who knows at what expense in terms of self-mortification) whether to write koperattiva or ko-operattiva. Such generosity in the exercise of power had indeed become rare.”
Different spellings could continue to co-exist for some words, according to individual judgment. That very word in English could be just as correctly spelt judgement; as in standardise or standardize’, washing-machine or washing machine, Moon or moon – all correct, in English.
Others would have us write atrociously ‘bleckbord’ and flett, spellings which were not justified by phonetics any more than by “the principle of fidelity to the word’s etymology…”
Sadly, with the advantage of hindsight, this succinct, learned and riveting assessment assumes more gravitas, the more so that, in the face of much controversy ever since, an open public ‘forum’ on the should-be uses of Maltese is being held by the Ministry of Education at the Excelsior Hotel on Saturday (7th November) from 8.30am.
Writing another book in a ‘Maltese’ which offends one’s scholarly conscience, ignoring etymology, semantics and literary praxis over the past decades, becomes an off-putting chore and the mere idea of paying any fines for that to anyone reprehensible.
I defer to Serracino Inglott’s philosophy of language, which does me proud. Others may be intimidated to ignore it, at their peril.
Henry Frendo is director of the Institute of Maltese Studies at the University of Malta.