While agreeing that linguists do not create languages (29 June) Charles Briffa asked whether it should be inferred from my article (24 June) “that historians can dictate usage”.
What I said was that: “No language worthy of the name can ignore, much less dismiss, praxis, corpora, the use of words and idioms made by its greatest authors such as Dun Karm, Rużar Briffa, etc.” As a student of the Maltese novel I would have expected this correspondent to be the first one to recognise this.
Unfortunately, this commissar’s position is at best elusive, not to say contradictory.
Writing in this newspaper in July 2015 under the heading ‘Dictating the Maltese language’, Briffa said that “it should be emphasised that accepting new forms does not necessitate supplanting older ones. It rather entails the coexistence of alternative forms that enrich the language and provide several occasions for stylistic and semantic variety...
“The respected old forms can still be kept alongside the new and may still be used with full potential... A regulatory authority is beneficial on matters relating to orthography. But it may be dangerous if it dictates spoken or written usage.”
Most people would agree that is how it should be, kunsill or no kunsill.
But he then took issue with the use of certain perfectly valid Maltese words (not however derived from English) in my introduction to Roderick Bovington’s work on Laurent Ropa published by Horizons in 2015 (‘Malti ta’ Barra’, Il-Mument, September 27, 2015).
The words which Briffa took it upon himself publicly to object to were naturalizazzjoni (denaturalisation), sapitutti (know-alls), alliev (pupil) andixximjottar (aping).
At the same time in his critique he himself freely used such anglicised words as tiddilja, tillinkja, approwċ, and so on.
This is the same person who had ‘corrected’ my Maltese in Miċ-Ċensura għall-Pluraliżmu: Il-Ġurnaliżmu f’Malta 1798-2002 (2003) by for example replacing my televiżjoni by his televixin, and so on.
What constituted body, in a constitutionally bilingual country, can oblige an appellant to submit his or her claim only in Maltese?
And that when we write and say programm televiżiv, xandira televiżiva.
The main point of my recent article ‘Use of written Maltese’ was to point out an all too necessary element of tolerance, and respect for the autonomy of the author, in the writing of one’s language, without uncalled for or newly-created strait jackets.
In Latin: quieta non movere. In other words: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I also said, paraphrasing Nels Anderson, that meddling with language orthography, grammar or idiom was ‘a minefield’.
That includes loan words, which may take time to become internalised, but which can render meaning more precise or indeed possible in the absence of native or authentic equivalents.
Spelling loan words phonetically as a norm further complicates matters, particularly as inverted commas and italics also exist, if one need have recourseto them.
I shall not quibble with a translator as to whether inixxi means leaks or oozes; or whether when we say, for example after a car accident, kien qiegħed isuq, i.e. bil-għaġġla or b’veloċita’, depending on circumstance and context, it means ‘he was speeding’; or ‘over-speeding’, without necessarily being (legally?!) obliged to use only jispidja.
According to Dun Karm (vol. 2, p.132, p. 261) ‘leak’ means inixxi, and so does ‘ooze’. We find much the same meaning in Aquilina (vol. 2, p. 1651 nixxa = ‘the roof is leaking’.
So what’s the big deal?
If respectful of the language and its literary history, who on earth is entitled to oblige a bona fide author, with a life-long track record, henceforth to start writing jillikja rather than inixxi - that is, if she or he chooses to continue using traditional language in its normal written form?
By the same token, given the very latest news, what constituted body,in a constitutionally bilingual country, can oblige an appellant to submit hisor her claim only in Maltese, if it is to be considered?
Henry Frendo directs the University’s Institute of Maltese Studies.