Shab indaqs fiz-zwieg
Before I begin: will all clever-clogs out there please desist from telling me to dot and cross letters? I know exactly where and how they should be dotted and crossed; I just can’t be fagged to fool around with the fonts. I also happen to believe that the person who came up with this dotting and crossing should have been stood against a wall and shot. If a human-being is capable of distinguishing between the different pronunciations of though, through and trough, then a human being is capable of picking up the fact that the ‘z’ in ‘zwieg’ is pronounced differently to the ‘z’ in ‘ziju’. And as for the dot on the ‘c’, when there is no equivalent without a dot……shoot the guy twice.
But back to Joseph! Joseph! He is ready to meet the prime minister (steady on, chap – you can’t do that until you’re opposition leader) for formal discussions on a great variety of issues, but he demands that he be treated as an equal because the party he leads represents half the population and so “should be treated with respect”.
He can’t seem able to grasp the fact that elections are zero sum games: you win the government, or you lose the government. And when you lose, you don’t get to be treated like the government, because you’re not the government.
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@DCG
Re: the crossing and dotting
I agree wholeheartedly when it comes to the letter ‘c’. However as for the two versions of ‘z’ I beg to differ. They aretwo totally different letters and the fact that they are represented by a similar symbol does not mean they are in any way interchangable.
‘gh’ is not a letter in English and so comparisons cannot be made.
@SB: they are only two totally different letters because somebody chose to make them so. You don’t have to have a different letter for every sound. Look at the Italians: to denote a soft ‘c’, they stick an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ after it. Or look at the English, who assume that the average person is intelligent enough to learn how to spell words that aren’t pronounced phonetically – and guess what, you and I both managed to do it when we were kids. Whoever came up with the spelling of the Maltese language assumed that the Maltese are stupid and need all the help they can get, and ended up complicating matters unnecessarily.
It’s not a matter of being able to understand it! I am able to read something written in ‘sms language’ but still would not consider that as the way forward!
The confusion (if it can be called so) arises from the fact that we write asemitic language using the Roman alphabet. In fact, even the ‘ghajn’ was coined to represent a semitic sound which is non-existent in the European mainland.
[Moderator – The ajn – that is how it is spelt – has no sound of its own. That is another mystery of the Maltese language: how we managed to turn something that in Arabic is an alphabetic letter with a distinct sound of its own into what is now essentially a ligature that serves only to modify the sound of other letters. P.S. The ajn was not coined by the Maltese and is actually one of the oldest letters in the Mediterranean. It literally means ‘eye’.]
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
@Mod
Sorry about the spelling…never seen it written actually. True it is an Arabic sound that was lost in Maltese as were other sounds! A few weeks ago, while watching Bondiplus, I was amazed that originally the Maltese used to distinguish between the two versions of ‘teghreq’ (to drown and to sweat) and the two versions of ‘hajt’ (wall and thread).
But should we get rid of tje ‘ajn’? I don’t think so as most grammatical rules would no hold!
Not just the dots and the crossings, but what about the “zewg vokali hdejn xulxin ma jghoqodux”? The guy who came up with that one deserves worse than being shot.
Then there’s the “ghajn”, which is highly superfluous, being the result of grammatical obsession (with classical Arabic in mind).
But on a different level, when are we going to realise that Maltese is derived directly from Phoenician (Punic) and not from Classical Arabic?
I had tried to define the Maltese language (other than the standard “Maltese is an Arabic dialect” we get today), but some “experts” said I was wrong without saying why. So here is my definition:
“Maltese is a Punic-Phoenician language sharing the same Canaanite Subgroup with other semitic languages, such as Aramaic and Old Hebrew, and developed throughout later centuries through the influences of Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sicilian, Spanish, Tuscan Italian, and even French and English. Old Maltese – Punic Maltese – is older than Classical Arabic. Arabic appeared well after the fall of Rome. It shares its roots with the same Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) origins as the Canaanite Subgroup, as well as other roots of Ethiopian origin. Arabic is not the origin of the Maltese language.”
This is the full article in Maltese: http://www.maltafly.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=784
And remember, the Phoencian civilisation, as a EUROPEAN civilisation, preceded that of Greece. Some “temple” remains in Lebanon and Syria put the Greek Acropolis to shame! The problem with the Phoencians (who at ine time also partially populated the southern parts of the British Isles) is that their history was written by their victorious enemies, the Romans! And we still suffer the consequences today…
[Moderator – Phoenician and Punic are two different languages. In any case, the Punic language was probably Arabised after the Arabic conquest of North Africa, which is why we might find it similar to Maltese. The Phoenicians were trading with Malta well over two millennia ago, and for the influences on local dialects to survive it would mean that the island would have had to be continuously inhabited by the same tribe for all that time, which I think is impossible.]
@europarl
“Zewg vokali fejn xulxin ma joqghodux” was NEVER a grammatical rule. I don’t know who instilled it in the minds of some primary teachers!
This is silly, the Maltese language is what it is, the ghajn is spelt with an “gh” since as you said it means eye. Maltese language is a very phonetic language. By this I mean a letter sound is always the same. Italian is another phonetic language. English on the other hand is not phonetic, ask people with reading difficulties and see how easier it is for them to read Italian or Maltese. It is silly of Daphne to say that we should do away with the dotting and crossing. Just goes to show how proud she is of her mother language. When it comes to the gh, actually it has a sound, which was lost, but in certain dialects it is still sounded.
Moderator, you come across as an oracle of false truths. Can’t you just approve a comment without having to insert your own stagnant philosophy? What you wrote is not even standard text book stuff, but the stuff of the imagination.
[Moderator – Is it?]
I haven’t seen such a cocktail of wrong notions for quite some time — at least in linguistic matters. There is no rule that one cannot have two vowels next to each other in Maltese. The rule is, basically, that you do not need a euphonic vowel (vokali tal-lehen) which is at the beginning of a word when the preceding word ends in a vowel. This is simple logic. The euphonic vowel is required when an agglomeration of successive consonants makes it impossible to pronounce the word – therefore, if the preceding word ends in a vowel, you do not insert a euphonic vowel. Hence “hgiega mkissra” and not “hgiega imkissra” where the “i” is a misplaced euphonic vowel and is redundant. Since this explanation may be somewhat difficult, some teachers used to say that you cannot have two vowels next to each other and, though this is not true, the wrong notion has survived for generations. Otherwise how are we to write “mara itwal”? Drop the “i” of itwal? Here the “i” is not a vokali tal-lehen. Or how are we to write “poeta”?
All modern respected linguistic scholars agree that Maltese is directly derived from Maghrebin Arabic (not Lebanese as some contend) and the Punic theory has been debunked for more than a century. Unfortunately, it was again given a short lease of life by Lord Strickland who did not want the Maltese (race and language) to be either associated with Italian or with Arabic – a classic case where politics presumes to prescribe science (see “the Language Question in Malta” by Geoffrey Hull).
The Maltese alphabet is basically a phonetic alphabet, though imperfectly so. Most modern alphabets of the world are phonetic and the others are exceptions. The Maltese alphabet was based on the Italian with some additions to provide for phonemes (sounds) that do not exist in Italian, notably “q” and letters with diacritical marks (dots and crossings) to distinguish one sound for another. Other languages too use such marks. Accents and cedilla in French are examples.
Actually, the digraph “gh” in the Maltese alphabet represents two distinct letters in Arabic: ajn and rajn. Its use in Maltese is largely etymological.
Basing arguments on information is admirable but basing them on misinformation or ignorance of the subject is hardly commendable.
Hi Freethinker – I don’t think we should complicate our alphabet because other nations choose to complicate theirs. English manages perfectly well without accents or other marks on its letters. To denote a particular sound, it just tacks two existing letters together, as with ‘th’ and ‘sh’. English is the world’s most flexible language because, among other reasons, it has a simple and flexible alphabet, and its spelling has developed organically.
@ Xewka – you sound like a Labour fossil when you speak about pride in the mother tongue. What does pride have to do with it? I’ve noticed that many of those who rant on about Il-Malti speak the Maltese equivalent of East End London English. The one thing you can be sure of is that when I speak or write Maltese, it’s the equivalent of the Queen’s English. Now that’s a debate we really should have. Who speaks the better Maltese – people like me, who learnt it correctly but to whom it isn’t a first language? Or people for whom it is a first language, but who speak it incorrectly just as so many Britons do with English?
I do not understand what you meant by not being treated like the government do you mean “with respect”?? Yes that would be your line of thought
@Europarl – Maltese is definitely not derived from Punic (the North African version of Phoenician) or from Phoenician itself. There was no continuity in the population. The Maltese population was formed in the Middle Ages from the descendants of Siculo-Arabs of Tunisian descent, who had settled here, Sicilians, and men who came and went. That’s why our word for mother is Arabic (omm) but our word for father is not (Abu in Arabic). The word we use for father is a corruption of monsieur, which tells you quite a lot. The fathers came, dropped their seed, and left.
@ Daphne… and how do you know that “there was no continuity in the population”? You are repeating an oft-repeated ‘mantra’ that lacks proof at every junction – anything new, please?
And how sure are you that “Omm” derives directly from Arabic and not Pheonician/Punic, given that both Phoenician and Arabic derive from the same Assyrian/Babylonian roots? (“Moderator” says Phoenician and Punic are different languages – yes, just like Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian are ‘different’ languages, I presume.)
It is for this reason that I made some research and wrote an article in Maltese about Maltese as a language, and the Maltese as a people – specifically to rid ourselves of these fallacies you are repeating.
That’s the problem with you people – outside the Maltese political partisan plain, there’s no critical thinking, no revisionism; you take everything lock, stock and barrel without questioning the details.
I came across this post in mfy which makes interesting reading. It seems that whoever wrote it is a woman who lived in, or visited Lebanon (some of the info here I can vouch for myself – I had two Lebanese friends in my student days, one of whom was from the mountain region, and we had often discussed these similarities).
Here is the post:
“Ghadni kif qrajt dak li ktibtu intom u nista nikkonferma, ghax hemm hafna kliem li jintuza biss mil-Maltin u l-Lebanizi… kliem bhal TIEQA (window) li ma ssibha mkien f’pajjizi Gharab. Jghiduha biss fil Libanu,filwaqt li f’pajjizi Gharab jghidu XIBBEK meta jirreferu ghal TIEQA. Il-kelma BEXXAQ ukoll tintuza mil-Lebanizi u l-Maltin biss. Kelma ohra hija GHADA (tomorrow). L-gharab jghidu BOUKRA, imma fil Libanu, specjalment fl-irhula u fil muntanji ghadhom jghidu GHADA. Hekk ukoll il-kelma ‘JIENA’. Hadt ma jghid JIENA hlief il-Maltin u l-Lebanizi. L-Gharab kollha jghidu ENA. ‘ISSA’ tintuza wkoll…l-Gharab jghidu HALLAQ(now), imma l-Libanu jghidu ISSA.
“U xi nghidu ghal kunjomijiet li ghad issib bl-eluf fil Libanu…. kunjomijiet bhal AMAIRA (fin-north tal-Libanu mimli bil kunjom AMAIRA), SALIBA, ZERAFA, GASAN, ZAHRA, CASSAR, ABELA, BARBARA-BARBERA, SAID u ohrajn. Nista nghid li hemm mijiet kbar ta familji kunjomhom CASSAR, ABELA,SALIBA u SAID. Is-SALIBAs ikunu nsara ovvjament, filwaqt li l-ohrajn jistghu jkunu kemm insara u kemm musulmani.
“U xi nghidu ghal QWIEL u PROVERBJI. Tismaghhom jitkellmu tghid li qeghda f’Malta. Juzawhom hafna meta jitkellmu u ezatt bhal taghna… kelma b’kelma… xejn mibdul.
“U haga ohra…fil primarja ghandhom li stejjer ta’ GAHAN. Fil-fatt gieli tkun ghaddejja min triq u tisma xi omm tghid lil binha li qisu GAHAN, ghax ikun ghadu kif waqqa xi gelat fuq hwejjgu. Li stejjer ta GAHAN huma l-istess bhal ma nafuhom ahna.
“Anki fizikament, il-Lebanizi jixbhu hafna lil Maltin. M’ghandhomx xehta ta l-Gharab ta’ l-Afrika ta’ fuq li naraw hawn Malta. Huma nies b’edukazzjoni ferm gholja u b’qalb tad-deheb. In fatti XEJN ma jiehdu gost jithaltu ma Gharab mill-Afrika ta fuq jew minn pajjizi girien taghhom… juzaw dan il-proverbju… IT-TIEQA LI MINNHA JITHOLLOK IR-RIH…SODDA U STRIEH,iggiefieri min fejn ikun gej it-trouble ghalaqlhu jew it-trouble ahirbu.
Risette Daccache
Vittoriosa.”
How does the theory that Maltese is an Arabic dialect explain these language similarities? (And please don’t tell me they came from the Arabicised Punic of North Africa, for in that case we would have at least had the Arabic version not the original Lebanese dialect. Tunisian is closer to Maltese because much of the coast had been populated by Carthaginians before the onslaught of Arabic… but they have no Gahan, it seems.)
[Moderator – Kev, Lebanese is written in Arabic script and developed with an Arabic influence. It is derived from Aramaic while the Phoenician language was not.]
Moderator, I know Lebanese is written in the Arabic script – but you don’t know what I’m talking about are you?
[Moderator – Not really, no.]
@ Daphne “If a human-being is capable of distinguishing between the different pronunciations of though, through and trough, then a human being is capable of picking up the fact that the ‘z’ in ‘zwieg’ is pronounced differently to the ‘z’ in ‘ziju’ , Is it OK for u if we start riting in sms lanuage?
@ Mod : Lebanese and Syrians are more ‘near to us’ than North African Arabs ,if one chooses the Malti Safi one can start a basic ‘conversation’ with them its not the first time I had this experience , and one can see how easy it is for them to pick our language.
I believe it has also been proven with DNA (oh that word again)tests.
http://www.dailymalta.com/wt/2005/02/malta-lebanon-connection.html
[Moderator – This is what the link says:
That last clause is simply not true. Phoenicia was conquered by the Persians 2,500 years ago and was then completely destroyed during the Punic Wars, 400 years later, and finally became part of Hellenistic Greece before ‘the past 2,000 years’ had even begun. How on earth were the Phoenicians supposed to settle here when they were all dead?]
@Kev/Europarl: how do I know what I am talking about? I studied the subject and read extensively about it for four long, solid years at university, in the course of which I was one of around just 10 students, from among many hundreds, who made the Dean’s List (apologies for the Joseph Muscat moment, but you left me with no choice).
This business about Maltese and Lebanese is just a myth. For a start, there is no such language as Lebanese. Lebanese is a reference to the people, not their language. Their language is Arabic. It seems to be more comprehensible to us because, like us, they speak slowly and enunciate the syllables clearly. However, if you spend any time at all in Tunis, you will realise that you are perfectly able to follow conversations in their entirety, and that their particular linguistic ‘mannerisms’ are exactly like ours.
Anyway, I usually find that when people are anxious to prove that Maltese is derived from Phoenician and not from Arabic, it’s because they’ve got a problem coping with the reality of our Arabic ancestry. I have no such problem. I actually think it’s quite glamorous. As for the reason why we look like the Lebanese (I certainly do, and am usually mistaken for one), there’s a very simple explanation: a genetic mix of many peoples who traded in the Mediterranean basin.
As for surnames, any surname which begins with Bu is Arabic, the ‘bu’ prefix denoting ‘father of’ or ‘master of’. Tunis is packed full of people called Buhagiar, except that there it’s spelt (in Latin script of course) as Bouhagiar. And the surnames you mention are not specifically Lebanese surnames, but Arabic ones, except for Gasan (Kazan – which, incidentally, is how we pronounce it) which is Armenian or thereabouts.
I find all this fascinating, but I prefer to run with the facts.
@John Schembri: doing away with dots, ticks, crosses and other signs of linguistic neurosis is not the same thing as writing in text message shorthand. If you remove the dot from the z in zwieg, it’s still zwieg and I imagine that you’re not going to get confused and begin pronouncing it with a hard z.
Kev (formerly europarl): “Anki fizikament, il-Lebanizi jixbhu hafna lil Maltin.”
I would have thought it was the other way round. As for the way that paragraph continues “M’ghandhomx xehta ta l-Gharab ta’ l-Afrika ta’ fuq li naraw hawn Malta. Huma nies b’edukazzjoni ferm gholja u b’qalb tad-deheb. In fatti XEJN ma jiehdu gost jithaltu ma Gharab mill-Afrika ta fuq jew minn pajjizi girien taghhom”, how’s that for a sweeping statement that clears the decks of history? “Gharab ta’ l-Afrika ta’ fuq li naraw hawn Malta” is hardly a scientific sample.
@Kev – something else: Caruana is one of the most common surnames in Malta, and is fairly frequent in Sicily. They all have one thing in common: their ancestors came from Kairouan in Tunisia, one of the largest (and the first) Arab city-strongholds in North Africa.
And do you know that our word for Christmas – Milied – is the word used in Islam for the feast of the birth of Mohammed? And that Randan is a corruption of Ramadan? And that il-Gimgha il-Kbira is Il-Gemgha l-Kbira (the great gathering)? Or that our word for Easter is the Islamic feast of Eid that marks the end of Ramadan?
Just to lighten the atmosphere: We’d still need a dotted “z” to distinguish between “zopp” and the “dotted z” version. Sorry, but I couldn’t resist! I agree with you entirely about the rest, though, Daphne.
Mandy, the one with the dotted z is spelt with a double b, not a double p. Don’t you remember the famous student T-shirts in the election campaign?
I am totally fascinated how this subject keeps cropping up from time to time to testify to our lingering crisis of identity, a phenomenon that has been with us for centuries after our contact with Islamic civilization was severed and we slowly shifted back to the European Christian world and later were ruled for three centuries by a religious chivalric Order. A peculiar history indeed.
There is confusion as to what is an Arab. Arabs are those who came from where there is the peninsula where Saudi Arabia is in the Arabian Gulf. Probably, only a minority of North africans are really Arabs. Many are of Berber and Moorish origin and the population is ethnically heterogenous just as we are and most Mediterraneans are. There is a not negligible element of European genes in countries like Tunisia too. By the time the “Arabs” took Malta, these blitzkrieg conquerors were already a mixture of Arab-speaking Muslims not necessarily all carrying Arab genes. Few people in Malta, who are not well-informed, understand this. Minds are confused and misinformation and old wives tales abound.
@Daphne: So far, you are the only one with a clear and informed view of things here (possibly me too). We differ in that I think that phonetic alphabets are the simplest. About Caruana surname, your theory could be right but needs support. If you’re right, Muscat could fall in the same category.
@europarl: in fact, the revisionists are those who believe (know, rather) that Maltese is a Maghrebin dialect – the two most important early scholars of Maltese, de Soldanis and Vassalli, both held Maltese to be Punic but Vassalli later realized it was Arabic and so does every professional linguist today. There is not even any indication of a Punic substratum in Maltese. Maltese is just the most romanized Arabic dialect just as the speech of Pantelleria is the most Arabicized Italian dialect. This pseudo-theory of Punic origins needs to be put to rest for ever – it is just false, period. At one time, it was thought the megalithic temples were Phoenician, the language was Punic and the Maltese are latter-day Phoenicians. All nonsense. Please, let’s stop thinking of Punic origins.
@Kev: Maltese is derived from the Maghreb dialects. One sure indication is the way the verb is conjugated and there is little more fundamental than verbs. It is more a question of morphology and semantics than vocabulary alone. You contribution (pardon me for saying it) has so many fallacies, it would take too long to tackle here. Gahan or his equivalent is found in the folklore of all Mediterranean countries. There is no such thing as “Arabicized Punic”.
That’s all for now.
Daphne – How could I forget them!
If you look at his Wikipedia entry, his mother is incidental, too, being mentioned simply as “Grace”:
“Family
Muscat is the son of Saviour Muscat and Grace. Muscat is married to Michelle née Tanti, and they have twins: Etoile Ella and Soleil Sophie.”
@ Daphne: I got this from the Malta University website , there are quite a lot of references to Lebanese (which is a language), regarding the z without a dot may I ask you how one would write in your Maltese : a lame person?
Maltese Alphabet Maltese Lebanese English
There are 29 letters in the Maltese Alphabet- 24 consonants, and vowels (a, e, i, o, u). It is pretty much the Latin alphabet, with the following exceptions:
ċ like ch in church, or tch in fetch ċaqċaq شقشق to crack
ġ like g in gem, or Lebanese ج ġarra جره pitcher
g like g in get, or bedouin ق , or Egyptian ج gideb كزب to lie
h is silent like in hour hawn هون here
When in final position, then soft aspirate like in who
ħ like h in hand, maybe pretty much like the Lebanese ح setaħ سطح سطيحة terrace Tripoli accent, again!
j like y in yellow jaħasra يا حسره alas, poor fellow
x like sh in shape Xuereb شوارب moustache
ż like z in zebra żahra زهره flower
z the Italian z, but has two different sounds. Like z in zorro and like ts in nuts zekzek تزقزق to hiss
q Mostly like a soft Lebanese hamza ( a’) like our Qaf in Lebanon qabad أبض seize, take, keep
Few regions in Malta pronounce it a q, like do people in Druze Mountains, and Syria qabda قبضة capture, handful
għ Ragarded as a single letter in Maltese. It is silent or pronounced
1) Pronounced like ħ ( equivalent to the Lebanese ع or غ )
in final position in certain verbs Żebagħ صبغ painted
@John Schembri: I do not see the point of your latest contribution. Alphabet and language are two separate things. In theory, one could have devised an alphabet that is neither the Latin nor the Arabic to write Maltese. M.A. Vassalli had, in fact, invented special letters which never caught on and had to be discarded. Z with and without dot is used as two quite distinct letters. In Italian, the “z” may express two phonemes; either z as in “pizza” or z as in “gazzetta”. It never has the sound of our dotted z which in Italian is written with an “s” e.g. “casa”. In fact, for the z as in gazzetta, our alphabet is deficient and we do not have a letter for this sound just as we do not have a letter for the phoneme transliterated as “zh” and occurs in such words as “television” which is usually inaptly spelt “televixin”. Maltese alphabet is basically phonetic but imperfectly so because of these deficiencies.
I do not know why you say “Lebanese hamza”. As far as I know, the hamza is pronounced the same in all Arabic dialects. It is known as the “glottal stop” and is present in many languages though it is not written. In the emphatic exclamation “Is that so?”, many would actually start the phrase with the glottal stop. It also replaces the “t” in cockney English.