I can’t understand why we are creating so much confusion about speaking and writing Maltese. Our so-called Maltese experts seem to be competing with each other over who is the best and I believe this is causing a great deal of confusion among Maltese speakers.

Most words have co-existed for ages and were never confused with each other. Now we have a problem with words like ‘skont’ meaning ‘discount’ and ‘skond’ meaning ‘according to’. What is the problem in writing them as they have been written for ages?

It is true that the letter ‘d’ at the end of a word in Maltese sounds more like ‘t’, which is the case with other letters too, but it doesn’t mean that we should spell both the same way.

Maltese is not the only language with such words. In English we have words like ‘eyes’ and ‘ice’, ‘loose’ and ‘lose’, ‘pace’ and ‘pays’ and many others. Yet nobody is suggesting that the spelling of these words should be changed.

I am the first to admit that our language has been botched up and I attribute this mainly to the broadcasting media. Something has to be done about this.