To ensure the widest possible coverage in the on-going Maltese language debate, this major exercise of national interest and significance should be made available to the entire population, on the broadest possible scale and without time limit constraints. Language development does not ‘happen’ within ‘measured portions of time’.

Surely the above approach would be far more transparent and more ‘consumer friendly’ instead of confining, under the misnomer of a ‘public meeting’, a one-off discussion of major national significance, within a physically enclosed and ‘controlled’ environment.

Restricting maximal participation in an enclosed room is open to unconscionable abuse by ‘stacking’, as witnessed in the case of the Akkademja ‘take-over’, ensuring a preconceived one-sided result, favouring a particular group to the detriment of the rest.

The overall public has the inalienable right to be privy to and to participate in all the on-going discussions regarding our language, with emphasis on the phrase ‘our language’... the language of our nation, of the Maltese people and not the sole property of a handful of uncompromising boastful ‘experts’.

The ‘minders’ of our indigenous tongue, through their own public declarations of utter disdain towards any criticism regarding our language management, as well as by their modus operandi, can never again be trusted to operate on an even keel.

The principal preoccupation currently involving our language is how to linguistically assimilate an unprecedented influx of English borrowings to the established sound, fundamental Semitic structure of Maltese with minimal disturbance.

With the ever increasing complexities brought on by this phenomenon, this language ‘onslaught’ is wreaking havoc upon the stability of our beloved ancient tongue. It is a realistic problem clearly imposing non-essential stress upon various aspects of our language including our idiom, phraseology, syntax and semantics. The quasi libertine attitude of freely accepting English vocables into Maltese, ad libitum, without any apparent restraint, if allowed to continue, will see the demise of our language and all else that goes with it. Current widespread code switching already points to such irreversible corrosive trends.

This current anxiety over excessive borrowing from an English vocabulary however, is not the singular cause for our national concern. For without admitting and correcting the still extant negative attitudes towards our own indigenous Maltese language, it would be futile trying to arrest the careless uptake of English words. If those among us who have lost all respect towards what is uniquely our own, are allowed to become a majority, Maltese will rapidly slide down the pathway to oblivion, as has happened to Welsh, Irish and Scottish.

One recalls the agitation raised against local journalists, accusing them of corrupting the language, both in the print media as much as through the spoken mode. That situation appears to have been exaggerated by their accusers for their own vested interests. Evidence for this conclusion is their accusers’ concerted attack upon the one segment of the community when, at the same time and over a far longer historical period, others had been openly antagonistic towards Maltese in every imaginable manner.

I remember all too well, even up to most recent times, when a number of private schools, both Church run and others, forbade their pupils to speak Maltese within the school precincts. Meanwhile, neither the governments of the day nor the Church authorities ever raised an eyebrow to right this national wrong.

As a college student in Malta of the mid to late 1950s, of the five languages we studied, judging by the hours allocated to the teaching of Maltese, it featured as least important. While the other four languages were accorded five lectures per six day week, Maltese was allocated a mere one to two sessions.

The flood of new borrowings from English written the Maltese way has demonstrably and understandably hurt the national sentiment

When I was teaching Maltese at one of the local secondary schools in 1981, upon sensing my enthusiasm for the language, the head of the school confronted me with the arrogant question “what is all this Maltese business about Mr Bovingdon?”

Back in Australia, over several years writing in the local Maltese Herald (now defunct), I frequently found myself having to defend my own native tongue against vitriolic verbal attacks from my own Maltese readers! No doubt this antagonism knew its roots from the mother country.

The same situation was rampant here in Malta when blatant public disgust with the Maltese language, was intermittently expressed in ‘letters to the editor’ in the local press. Similar open disdain for Maltese was also defiantly voiced in the spoken media, often by supposedly learned individuals.

This tragic situation is a clear reflection of the deep seated anti-Maltese prejudice in some quarters of our society, that has persisted to this day, well after the infamous ‘language question’ was thought to have disappeared from our national psyche.

Is it any wonder in such an atmosphere that our journalists might not have been up to scratch in their language delivery? Why did the critics focus only on them when other sectors such as certain commercial establishments, some members of the legal profession, etc., were openly hostile to Maltese? I think the answer is that journalists were an easy target. Hence they bore the brunt of the unbalanced assault.

The question of applying Maltese phonetics to words borrowed from English is not an initiative of the National Council for Maltese.

The late Ġużè Aquilina had been using this method in his writings long before he even thought of compiling his famed dictionary. Others of equal conviction followed in his wake, even before the Akkademja’s 1984 amendments.

But Aquilina or even the Akkademja never proclaimed ‘by decree’ that this was the only way to go, with dire consequences to follow for non-compliants. Aquilina was wise enough, as well as sensitive to the people’s national sentiments, that he unceremoniously inserted the use of his borrowed terminology into the mainstream of his Maltese orthography.

When Erin Serracino Inglott bequeathed our nation with his encyclopaedic dictionary Il-Miklem Malti, he adopted the etymological system of orthography. This was diametrically contrary to his contemporary Aquilina. To justify his unilateral stance Serracino Inglott devised his own so-called ‘humanised grammar’.

Aquilina, a world-renowned scholar of Maltese, who commanded the utmost respect among his peers, never derided Serracino Inglott. Instead the two scholars in 1976 were brought together by the Akkademja to present their views at two special meetings held at the Old University in Valletta. This historic event points to the early inroads, words borrowed from English had already been exerting upon Maltese.

Long before Aquilina set his thoughts on his Maltese dictionary, he and many other local writers (novelists, dramatists, journalists, teachers, radio presenters, etc.) had already become accustomed to writing a considerable number of words and phrases from English with Maltese phonetics without causing any ripples.

This approach was only applied after these lexical items had comfortably ‘fitted’ into a Maltese linguistic mould. Such examples as ixxuttja, kejk, illandja, ikkraxxja, għafas il-gass, manuvri, xelter/xeltrijiet, ittajpja, l-istejġ, wejla, bajla, pikles were the accepted norm; no one cringed at their usage.

I hark back to Aquilina, for with some minor slips, he has left us the basic tools and framework with which and upon which we can build and expand, enabling us to satisfactorily deal with the present vicissitudes beleaguering Maltese. Aquilina the consummate scholar, with his broadminded approach, even included spelling variations as well as the so-called dialectal occurrences.

Orthographically our choice must remain that of the present... a combination of etymology and phonetics as imperfect as it may be. This approach is based on the established 1924 grammar issued by the Għaqda tal-Kittieba tal-Malti together with the Akkademja’s amendments of 1984.

The above system has served us well. The few minor slips inadvertently included therein have been so well absorbed that it will serve no beneficial purpose to amend them. Their only interest is academic.

However, in dealing with the spelling of words borrowed from English language sources, in order to diminish the effect of being saturated with the sudden influx, we need to adopt a more measured mode of acceptance. How soon do we admit English terminology into our language? Before new borrowings are accepted into our vocabulary, let us first try to formulate local calques. If unsuccessful then we admit the new lexemes by adapting them to Maltese phonetics.

In considering the above suggestion, I note with some reserve that the Semitic base of Maltese, upon which our grammars and dictionaries have been designed, has been sidelined in preference to freely borrowing from non-cognate language sources, without firstly scrutinising our inbuilt morphology. This latter very rich and potentially productive system would enable us to generate new lexemic forms, often to the exclusion of supercilious accretions from non-conforming foreign stock.

But over the years it has become anathema to create (not invent) new words for new concepts, out of our own inbuilt linguistic framework. As if cleverly applying our intrinsic Semitic base is risking some kind of contagion! This unscholarly bias towards our indigenous tongue is surely another one of the principal reasons underlying our overzealous readiness in adopting foreign terminology from non-cognate language sources.

In the current atmosphere, the flood of new borrowings from English written the Maltese way, has demonstrably and understandably hurt the national sentiment. And without pulling any punches, what further inflated this touchy situation was the ill-considered, arbitrary, insensitive and autocratic stance taken by the Kunsill tal-Malti in gazetting their infamous Deċiżjonijiet 1!

In the preface to his famed dictionary the renowned Samuel Johnson denounced the idea of an academy for the English language as contrary to the spirit of English liberty. When a similar idea was proposed in the US it was rejected outright.

The Italians with the variety of opinions expressed at their Accademia della Crusca debates and the French with their long standing conflicts within the Alliance Francaise, failed in controlling the influx of foreign borrowings. But diligent vigilance has managed to exert a degree of sanity without corroding the fundamentals of their respective national languages.

Qui transtulit sustinet!

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