In his Talking Point ‘Aquilina’s abbandonxipp’ (December 8), Joseph Brincat picked upon a word in my earlier Talking Point ‘Are we losing ourselves?’ (November 26) and made an argument for writing English words in Maltese, using Aquilina’s dictionary, which I had not mentioned. What readers thought of this he can see for himself by reading their comments on his article.
He says that Aquilina “did not include skond as an entry in his Maltese English dictionary”. This is incorrect. Aquilina gives skond as a separate entry in Vol. 2 of his dictionary (Midsea, 1990) on p. 1331, column ii.
With etymological correctness he defines skond specifically as meaning ‘according to’. He also gives two entries for skont, the first meaning of course a discount, and the second ‘according to’ because as he says in pronunciation the ‘d’ at the end in this word (like so many others!) sounds like a ‘t’.
However he also gives skonta, on the following page, meaning ‘to discount’, which is the meaning of skond/skonta usually used by our Maltese writers in Maltese literary history.
To his credit, even in the second meaning of skont, Aquilina takes care to respect and list its variants or alternatives, all of them, as skond jien, skond hi, skond dawk, skond huma, and so on.
This could be a matter for interpretation, certainly not for imposition.
In his three-volume dictionary, Dun Karm, our national poet, who knew Maltese, only gives skond to mean “according to” (vol. 1, p.5) and skont to mean “discount, qtigħ minn kont, minn dejn” (vol. 1, p. 356).
As is well known, and as both Brincat and I already have repeatedly written, currency in standard language depends largely on acceptance by writers and praxis. How many Maltese language authors and litterateurs have actually ever been using ajrix, for example, since the publication of Aquilina’s dictionary in 1990? So what is the point? (Incidentally, ajrix is supposed to stand for Irish.) Unless effective remedial measures are taken by the authorities to stop this recently galloping and confusing ‘re-inventing the wheel’ trend, we would do well to keep in mind the depressing SEC results in Maltese and English, let alone in history.
The third point in my article concerned declining religious belief on one hand, and fundamentalist, indeed Islamist, trends, which were being given public space, on the other hand – that on top of the glaring ignorance of our history and the sowed confusion about writing in Maltese (and, partly as a consequence, writing in English).
Counting angels on the head of a needle in some philological theory is, to put it mildly, secondary.