Leave the kids alone
The Labour Party, the Nationalist Party’s youth organisation and Alternattiva Demokratika have found something on which to agree: that 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote in local council elections. The Labour Party appears to wish to take this further. From what Joseph Muscat has said, it seems that local councils will be used as a sort of trial run for general elections. He thinks that 16-year-olds see him as young and hip, and will rush to vote for him. I hate to disabuse him of the notion, but I clearly remember thinking at 16 that people of 20 were over the hill.
The news has been greeted with general scepticism by the parents of 16-year-olds, for a variety of reasons that ranges from knowing what 16-year-olds are actually like to understanding that at 16 they don’t give a flying monkey’s about local councils and nor should they do so. After all, plenty of adults don’t give a flying monkey’s about local councils, and I am one of them. With the exciting and interesting lives that 16-year-olds lead today, I can’t imagine them poring over the list of teachers and middle managers and clerks – one grey face after another – presented to them at the polling-booth and thinking how lucky they are to have the vote and how it’s what they’ve been waiting for all their lives.
Being 16 is all about having fun, in between the trials of examinations. Some of the more sour grown-ups may gripe about it, but they’re just envious people who want kids to have a hard time as well. The last thing you need at that age is to have politics foisted upon you, as all those of my generation know only too well. We could have done without it, thank you very much. There is plenty of time for the concerns of adult life when you are actually an adult, but there seems to be a conspiracy afoot to force the very young into a life of far greater responsibility than they need or even want.
Frank Psaila, spokesman for the Nationalist Party’s youth organisation, wrote that it is unacceptable for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds not to have the vote when they work and pay tax. His general drift was that there should be no taxation without representation. Allow me to turn that argument around. What is truly unacceptable is that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds pay tax. They don’t earn that much, and there is strong justification for allowing them a tax holiday until they turn 18. It’s bad enough that they are not still in education or training at that age, which means that they are likely to stay in low-level jobs for the rest of their lives. So to reverse Mr Psaila’s argument: rather than saying that 16-year-olds should have the vote because they pay tax, what we should be saying is that 16-year-olds shouldn’t pay tax because they don’t have the vote. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to think of it that way, would you?
Paying tax isn’t necessarily a justification for getting the vote, in any case. Plenty of non-Maltese live and pay tax here without being able to vote in general elections.
If we are going to argue that 16-year-olds are little different to 18-year-olds (they’re definitely not, as anyone who recently had some at home knows), then we might as well take the case all the way and argue for a lowering of the age of maturity to 16. Why not, if 16-year-olds are like 18-year-olds? If they are going to get the vote, then they might as well get a driving licence (but they won’t find anyone to insure them), and be fully emancipated to enter into contracts without their parents’ knowledge or consent (but that means they are left to fend for themselves when it all goes haywire; after all, they’re adults). And go on, let’s start publishing the names of those who are under 18 and who are being prosecuted. Why not, if they’re old enough to vote?
Some people dragged in the fact that 16-year-olds can marry, so they should vote. That is another argument that has to be turned on its head. Sixteen-year-olds should not be allowed to marry. The very idea of somebody making such a decision at that age is obscene. The provision in our law, which allows 16-year-olds to enter into a contract of marriage with the express permission of their parents, is an archaism. It is a legacy of the days when pregnancy outside wedlock led to a shotgun marriage, because having a child while unmarried was a shocking disgrace that ruined a girl’s life. That provision in the law was driven by the need to protect pregnant girls from social disgrace. We don’t need it anymore. Let’s scrap it immediately. No 16-year-old is capable of deciding who she (for it is usually a she) wants to spend the rest of her life with.
I really couldn’t be bothered either way if 16-year-olds get the vote. To my mind, a more pertinent question is: why? Why give the vote to 16-year-olds? It’s not as though they’ve asked for it. It’s not even as though they want it. When the news reporters went to the student organisations to ask them what they think, the general consensus was pretty much “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“At 16, you don’t really know what you like in life, let alone who to vote for,” one 16-year-old said, adding that people his age would just solve the quandary by copying their parents. Or deliberately doing the opposite of what their parents do and say, I might add, this being exactly what so-called sweet 16 is all about.
The president of the Junior College Students Council made the interesting point that giving the vote to 16-year-olds is like giving additional votes to their parents. It looks like this particular 16-year-old is more intelligent and insightful than the politicians. He has been the only one to point out so far – though not in as many words – that there is an essential, fundamental and all-important link between emancipation and the vote. When you have the vote but not legal autonomy (until you are 18 you cannot have control over your affairs and your parents are responsible for you), your vote is actually an extension of somebody else’s. That is why, historically, the burning issue of votes for women was intrinsically bound up with the emancipation of women from the legal control of their husbands or fathers.
You would think that with all that needs to be done in this country, the political parties would have found something else to be getting on with.
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The National Council for the Maltese Language has dealt with the varying spellings of 300 Maltese words and has laid down the law, in a notice published in The Government Gazette, as to their official spelling. A committee of 11 academics spent long hours and even days in conference, discussing whether we would be permitted to spell the word for August as ‘Awissu’ or ‘Awwissu.’ They decided on the latter. The committee will now turn its attention to the spelling of English words that have entered the vernacular (Spakxin, anyone? Rawdebawt?), and also to 500 phonetic variants.
I seem to be missing something with this last one. Differences in pronunciation that are due to dialect shouldn’t make for differences in spelling. Scouse is about as different as you can get from what is literally the queen’s English, but whatever the differences between the way a Liverpudlian pronounces ‘bread’ and the way Prince Charles does, it’s still spelt b-r-e-a-d. I hope we are not going to create any problems on this score, because all this fluffing around with language is tedious enough as it is.
The upshot of it all is that we now have our very own language police. We have been told that though the official spellings have ‘come into effect immediately’, we have been granted a three-year changeover period in which ‘to comply’. If we don’t comply, we will be put in the stocks and pelted with copies of Anton Buttigieg’s poetry books and Guze Aquilina’s dictionary.
While I admire all this dedication to lending some sort of order to the language – something to which Samuel Johnson dedicated himself with the English language three centuries ago – there is something ever so slightly insufferable about the bossy-boots tone of some of the more nitpicking diktats. There are some which I just can’t understand, and others which I won’t be obeying, like the rather odd decision to treat north, south, east and west as proper nouns by capitalising them even when they don’t form part of the name of a place or a region.
The most interesting thing about all this is the vast gulf between the professors debating the spelling of ‘skont’ or ‘skond’ and the people actually out here speaking Maltese. The common myth is that it’s only the tal-pepe people with their Inglizati who speak Maltese badly, when it’s not so much that they speak the language badly as that they don’t know how to speak it at all, or in a very limited way. The reality is that most of those who are butchering and mangling Maltese are the ones of who speak nothing but. This is not surprising, because the inability to speak anything but Maltese is usually associated with a poor level of education, and that in turn generally means unsound grammar, contorted syntax and slipshod use of vocabulary. I’ve noticed that people who speak only Maltese rarely speak with care and precision. So much attention, much of it scathing, has been paid to the tal-pepe speakers of English that no attention at all has been given to those who speak Maltese as their mother tongue, and who speak it really badly. There seems to be general agreement that anybody who is a native speaker of Maltese is OK and in the clear, even if this person can’t string a simple sentence together.
While we fluff around with ‘karozza’ or ‘karrozza’ (now there’s a conundrum) and ‘lembuba’ or ‘lenbuba’, people are becoming increasingly incomprehensible.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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Who are the “National Council for the Maltese Language” anyway? What right has this council to impose their own language on us? If my own community is maltese and we speak our own specific dialect and mix of english/maltese pigeon language, then this dialect become our maltese language, a language is what you use to express yourself and shouldn’t be constrained by some artificial “National Council” . After all, no language is pure, language evolves such like everything else and has roots in different cultures.
The issue of the maltese language is being used by certain groups to wield power and discrimination between different maltese communites, all of which should have equal right to determine what type of language they can use to communicate.
[Daphne – What I find particularly interesting is that official English is the queen’s English, but official Maltese reflects the vocabulary choices and pronunciation of the lower-middle-class and the educated working-class.]
The argument that 16 year-olds should have the vote because they pay tax makes no sense because, in fact, tax is not paid when one reaches 16. Tax is not only income tax – VAT is also tax and that is paid by everyone. Should we give the vote to a six year-old because he pays VAT when he buys sweets out of his pocket money? The dictum “no taxation without representation” may therefore not be applied indiscriminately and senselessly (as is well-known, it was coined by British colonists in pre-revolutionary America on the basis of the 1689 Bill of Rights: the colonists were taxed without having representatives in Whitehall).
Regarding decisions on Maltese orthography, in my opinion, the Council should not have disturbed the spelling of words like “skond” when it has been in use for decades or longer – what difference does it make if it is spelled skont or skond? This is mere pedantry and enforces the impression that Maltese orthography is a hassle and in a permanent state of flux. Only students who have to sit for exams will pay any attention to the new rules, if at all, and only until such time as they obtain their certificate in Maltese. The rest will not care much – few will bother to learn the rules just as many have never really understood Maltese rules about gh, ie and the phonetic vowel. Laws incapable of enforcement by sanctions are ineffective. The only sanctions will apply to marking exam papers and will only contribute to make Maltese even less loved. What other sanctions can there be? The pelting with books mentioned by DCG would have to be ordered by a judge and when it comes to the Maltese spelling of some judgments… well, the least said, the better…
I fully agree with Daphne on the issue of minors, taxation, voting and other rights.
At age sixteen, young people ought to have the opportunity to further their studies and have different experiences for personal enhancement.
A serious and responsible government, would first and foremost, examine the well-being of its youth and take appropriate decisions rather than rushing into hasty pronouncements concerning them. Giving the vote to sixteen year olds is certainly not the way of promoting our youth’s interests.
For instance, it is high time that the authorities take stock of the student retention rate in higher and further education. Why is it that Malta has one of the lowest rates among EU countries? And what about seriously investigating absenteeism and child labour?
One would expect the opposition to raise these questions. Instead, we are being dished with eye-catching but counter-productive youth policy proposals.
Lowering the voting age will effectively lower the age of majority, when one is considered an adult… Isn’t this a way of shedding off societal responsibility and burdening it squarely on the young an inexperienced?
I completely agree with you regarding the new Maltese language ‘rules’. I firmly believe that although the experts are probably the most appropriate people to perform the required ‘fine-tuning’, a language does not only belong to the experts but also to the people who speak it – so I just hope that the decisions were not taken with total disregard to the feelings of ‘the people out there’. You have yourself stated that you’ve no intention of abiding by all of these new rules. I emailed them to express my particular dissent at the decision regarding ‘skond’ and ‘skont’, and to say that I’ve no intention of abiding by this rule. All I got in reply was a “Grazzi tal-interess. Jekk tixtieq tirċievi l-fuljett stampat, ibgħatli l-indirizz residenzjali.” If there are many people out there who will resist these changes – the council will have achieved the opposite of what they tried to achieve. Maybe in time I will just bow down my head and comply. But I still fail to follow their line of thought. Imagine if phonetically-similar, yet inequivalent words were also merged in the English Language – “I have bean asked to right ‘skont’ weather I like it or knot”. But no, no-one ever thought of reducing English into an ‘English for Dummies’ version – even if I, for one, still struggle with ‘where’ vs ‘were’ on a daily basis. Sorry, but this is how I feel. And those who might think I’m being stubborn should keep in mind that experts are there to be challenged. We are all experts in our own field after all, and criticism should be allowed, if not appreciated.
[Daphne – I agree with you that the written version of Maltese has been constructed artificially as a language for dummies or for people with a low IQ. That’s what happens when it is ‘invented’ at one go by a well-meaning Father of the Maltese Language instead of being allowed to develop naturally and organically. The problem, I suppose, is that too many Maltese were illiterate for too long, but if we had allowed for organic development, written Maltese would still be roughly where written English was in the 16th century – if that. I make the same ‘language for dummies’ point as you do, and repeatedly, about all those crossed hs, dotted gs, cs and zs. The rules seem to have been laid down for their own sake, to make things as annoying as possible, and to give the language police a reason for living. Look at the number of Labour-leaning columnists and Malta Today reporters busying pointing out with glee that I ‘misspelt’ the Maltese word for vagina because I failed to put an ‘ghajn’ in it. They missed the rather delightful irony that ‘ghajn’ is also the slang for anus, which had me in fits. The sad thing is that, unlike with mainstream European languages, the written version of which has evolved over a thousand years, we had the perfect opportunity when casting written Maltese in stone to create something as user-friendly as possible, and instead we went the other way with all our irritating and pointless dots, dashes and ghajns. Whoever came up with the idea assumed that unless there’s a dot on the zs in ‘zunzana’, we’ll all go around pronouncing it ‘tsuntsana’ – you know, like tourists trying to read a foreign language. Yet with or without a dot, we know how to pronounce the word, because we know the language, and because the human brain is able to read by recognition, and doesn’t need pronunciation guides like dots and crosses. So other languages put little marks on their letters? So what? Why take on burdens that serve no practical purpose? The ‘ough’ in though, through and tough is pronounced completely differently, for example, but despite the lack of a distinguishing mark, we still know how to pronounce them, because we have a brain that can assimilate that kind of knowledge once it is learnt.]
I can’t understand why this crusade against JM’s proposal of letting 16+ vote in local council elections. Probably it’s because JM is proposing it, so let’s rubbish him. That 16/17-year olds don’t care about politics is untrue, probably it’s the period of their lives where they most feel “kannoli bla krema” … at least that’s how I felt when I was 16. And what is being proposed is local council elections, not general elections … hardly elections which change the way a country is heading!
Instead, we prefer to treat under 18s as dimwits but then, when they turn 18, they are suddenly considered fully as adults. Hardly makes sense as the growing process towards adulthood is a continuous one, and not triggered by an 18th birthday!
Perhaps the writing of newer editions of Maltese language books has exhausted all possible variations of the same content. What better solution than to cook up newer editions of the language itself.
DCG, we’re paired up in the Sunday Binliner, aka Kull Hadd. Aren’t you honoured? There’s even a pretty picture … of me! Eat your heart out… http://www.kullhadd.com/?task=2§id=1&articleid=11862
[Daphne – Yes, and Malta Today has revisited its obsession with me, which is always a sign that the news is pretty thin. Nothing for the front or back page? Let’s see what Daphne’s been up to. Oh, Toni Abela’s written a column about her in L-orizzont for a change? Front page stuff….]
‘Fraid I don’t buy Malta Today any more, unless absolutely necessary. Too much ranting, too little news.
[Moderator – So much anger, so little time.]
@ Andrew Borg Cardona
Don’t flatter yourself. Stop comparing yourself to Daphne, her articles are in a different league to yours,
your own articles just don’t have the depth, the research, the humour and the balls that Daphne’s articles have.
We only have two real journalists in Malta, Daphne CG and Saviour Balzan , the rest of you are just wannabe copycat journalists. You will have to try harder.
[Daphne – Errrrmmmm, thanks for the compliment, but Saviour Balzan?]
London Area – to use a phrasing with which you would be familiar and which appears to be pitched at about the level of your intellect: sit and swivel.
“sit on it and swivel” is the correct phrase Andrew Borg Cardona.
I agree with Daphne on this issue, I do not like these changes that are being implemented in the Maltese language. It is horrible to read a sentence like the following:
“Il-kowc baght ijmejl lill wiehed mil-futboolers tieghu” I mean … come on!
Southern, I thank you for adding anatomical detail to my invitation to London Area. It’s a pity this comment-roll doesn’t support graphics.