Another fetishist
There are foot-fetishists (there was rather an amusing episode of Sex and the City) and then there are village dialect fetishits. Here’s one, writing in The Malta Independent today. Apparently, I ‘waffle my way like a bull in a china shop’ – and that, dear friends, comes from a self-professed student of languages and dialects. Hmmm. Let’s hit him with Scouse, shall we? That should send his adrenalin-reading right off the charts. Do I hate this country and all who live here? Well, hardly – unless insufferable fools can be said to represent their country. There seem to be quite a lot of them about, and most of them write letters to the newspapers. It’s always interesting to see that what, elsewhere, are considered to be normal (and even fairly pedestrian) opinions are here considered, by people like this man, to be ‘enigmatic’. I can’t say it’s surprising.
Daphne and Gozo dialects
by Franco Farrugia
I love the Maltese language, yet, I am no “Gozo-fanatic”, nor am I in any way a “dialect-fetishist”: therefore, I feel irritated by Daphne Caruana Galizia’s way of describing the “Dialect-fest” to be held by Munxar local council (Cocaine and gonorrhoea – but please, no divorce, TMID, 28 August). This is a celebration of Gozitan dialects. And we, who study languages (and not just the Maltese language, may I add!) know how important dialects are.
Even the EU does its best to encourage the use of dialects, in its promotion of cultural diversity. This can be seen both in the various EC regulations that treat the subject, as well as the frequent discussions and statements put before the EP.
So, returning to Daphne… she’s quite an enigma, to me. She can write so well, and she can write on issues which are very important and which are quite high on the agenda, for average citizens, such as myself.
However, as happens with all columnists, I suppose that there are times when she absolutely has nothing to write about. Some of her writings are far from being “factual discussions” but outright disgusting, insulting and demeaning!
I don’t think that Daphne really has a clue regarding the Maltese language – much less the culture of dialects. Far from being, as Daphne calls it, a “sort of minutiae of introspection”, such a celebration of dialects is heartening to those who love Maltese and Gozitan culture. Nearly every village in Malta has its own dialect, and believe me, Daphne, that has nothing to do with “isolation or relative isolation”. It has to do with the history and culture of that particular town or village.
In the same article I am criticising, she writes: “some people … don’t seem to realise how out of touch with reality they are…!” The very fact that Daphne is curious to know “how different the dialect of one village can possibly be from the dialect of another” really shows, goodness me, how ignorant she is of Maltese life! Now let’s see who is living “in isolation” in this country!
In her article, then, she continues waffling her way as if she were a bull in a china shop, and suggests what these dialects could be. With what right does she downplay and criticise such dialects if she has never had real experience in such contexts?
I really have come to believe that Daphne hates this country and all who live here. Well, especially now that we are members of the European Union, it’s quite easy for her to solve that problem.
No?
Franco Farrugia
Pieta
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did you miss this gem?
“Daphne and Gozitans ”
by Miriam Cassar
“I write in reference to Daphne Caruana Galizia’s article (Cocaine and gonorrhoea – but please, no divorce, TMID, 28 August). If she wants to call someone lunatic with regard to Maltese literature and dialects, please call me and not the Gozitans. ”
Call her Daphne.
[Daphne – the usual mentalita bazwija]
Uwijja djalett, issib nies flok jghidu tejd ‘taf’ jejdu ‘tuf’. Jew flok jghidu ‘telefown’ jejdu ‘telefonn’. Big deal Franco.
[Daphne – For once we’re of the same mind, John. That’s exactly what I wrote in the article to which he objected. It’s not a dialect. It’s just a slight difference in vowel sounds. And most of it is related to social group rather than to geography. I think our Franco Farrugia will find that the smart families of Gozo don’t speak with a Gozitan accent, still less with a Munxar accent. They speak like the smart families of Valletta (yes, there were some once), Sliema, Lija, Balzan and Mdina.]
Sicilianu is dialect, if not a variant of Italian. Maltese has lots of elements from Sicilianu.
Interesting page about Sicilianu and Italian dialects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language
A real dialect is when you buy Totti’s joke book written in ‘Roman’ and you can hardly understand it even when you’re quite ok in understanding Italian.
If you can easily understand it and it’s only a very little different then it’s hardly a dialect. After all Gozo is too small but…not small in pride which is why they will hang on to this no matter what anyone says. So why bother?
My view is that in Gozo one finds variants of the Maltese language through the changing of the vowels, as is the case in various towns and villages in Malta. Most probably more “old-Maltese” words survived in terms of usage in Gozo than in Malta, but then you would still not call that a dialect but rather a more extensive use of the maltese vocabulary.
@Daphne: I agree with your statement that “… the smart families of Gozo don’t speak with a Gozitan accent…”. Most of us (I am from Gozo) tend to use the gozitan variant at home but once we are communucating or in a group which is not 100% from Gozo (i.e. being at work, or somewhere, anywhere in Malta), we switch to Maltese in its correct phonetic form! :) Having said that, quite a few people still think it is “cool” and “patriotic” to speak gozitan (or zebbugi or bormliz etc) in all instances: personally I think it is offensive to the person you are communicating with.
@John Meilak
Fascinating stuff.
Now I know where Maltese words like babbu, buqar, cirasa, and intamat come from!
Question to all: since Maltese (like basically all languages, e.g. siculi mentioned here) has inherited most of its vocabulary from other languages/dialects throughout the ages, why is there so much fuss nowadays about words like bagit? Is it not more natural (as has happened in the past) to incorporate such words in the Maltese vocabulary, naturally after agreeing (through popular use) of the correct spelling of such words?
Lest someone misunderstands me, I am not advocating translating Sciences and other highly technical textbooks into Maltese, just incorporating commonly used words.
[Daphne – The problem with spelling English loanwords according to Maltese phonetics is that this is meant to be a bilingual English/Maltese country. In other languages – Russian, Spanish – English loan-words are respelt accordingly. The Russians and Spanish don’t have to live with English on a daily basis, and so there is no confusion. In Malta, on the other hand, there is a duality of languages, and people are expected to switch from spelling an English word in English to spelling it ‘in Maltese’. That’s creating lots of confusion, especially with children, who are being taught to spell ‘blackboard’ in English and ‘blekbort’ – note the vowel sound and the final t – in Maltese.]
@John Meilak
The Wikipedia article you mentioned is VERY interesting. Goes to show, in my opinion, that many of the Maltese words we think were taken from Italian, were in fact taken either from Sicilian, or from the language from which they were incorporated in Sicilian.
For example,
Pinzell is coming from either Sicialina pinzèddu, or Spanish/Catalan pincel (as far as I know the ‘c’ in Catalan is pronounced harsh ‘s’, or ‘z’.)
Many must have heard of the ‘spati’ suite of cards, coming from spatari
And this must be my favourite – I always wondered how many people refer to a lonely person/ a person who is alone as sulu sulu. This must be coming from Sicilian sulità.
Am I right jew?
[Daphne – I would say that ‘sulu sulu’ is just ‘solo solo’.]
Are we going to hear some BRAJKU in this festival?
Daphne, you’re a godsend. You entertain, you challenge, sometimes you irritate but you’re always interesting to read. So keep stirring the pot so that some of the scum can be removed from the broth.
Does anyone here know where the word “XMARA” came from ? In Malta we don’t have rivers.We were given an explanation at school.
@ Daphne
Won’t blekbort instead of leaving it as blackboard
just lead to more epples?
[Daphne – Dets natink. You should see the Maltese books my primary-school-age nieces have to work with: full of tfal liebsin gersijiet u XORZ, and a KUXIN on di sufan. And in summer they go out on a jott and eat a pekt lanc.]
@Daphne,
Your answer to my comment is well put. I am far from being a linguist, but I cannot fathom how blackboard becomes blekbort in Maltese. Who decides these things? Is that supposed to be populist parlance and pronunciation? So, I guess, insurance becomes ‘inxurjans’?!! And petrol becomes ‘petlor’? !!! LOL!!!
Whatever, maybe it’s just that we adults in our forties see these changes as anathema; maybe all these debates will be forgotten in a few years. After all, I don’t believe anybody nowadays confuses spelling, for example, cigarette in English and sigarett in Maltese… or do they?
[Daphne – Oh, you mustn’t forget the nicest one of all: union pronounced like onion but with a long UUUU sound, hence the Maltese ‘l-unjin’ instead of ‘il-junjin.’ There isn’t a y in front of the u, you see, so it can’t possibly be yoon-yin. When I insist on pronouncing it as il-junjin, union types think I’m using the ‘English’ word because I’m tal-pepe, instead of just using the correct pronunciation. Unbelievable. I’m all agog to find out Tony Zarb pronounces the word when speaking English at these international union jamborees he goes to. “Because the OOOOONNNYin…”]
There are other words I personally refuse to use – mitjar, bdot and btala come to mind.
Does it sound bad if instead of JUNJIN we say and write “Ghaqda ” ?
What’s wrong with “btala”,Dave?
And “Mitjar” was written on the crest of RAF Luqa by the Brits “Mitjar qatt mirbuh”. Or they were being holier than the pope?
What should we write PAJLIT or BDOT?
Years ago I told a professor of Maltese linguistics that our language variations should not be honoured with the title ‘dialect’ as they are hardly different from each other except for the pronunciation of some vowels.
It turns out, however, that the term can be applied to any regional variation and, indeed, even social ones (though, in the latter case somebody has coined the ugly term ‘sociolect’)
Italy is not a good example in this context as the extreme differences between dialects are exceptional and not found in any other European country. A combination of geographical and historical factors caused many areas to develop in isolation and each region and province acquired its own special way of speaking. As Daphne said, isolation is essential for the development of a language variant and the more effective the isolation, the more noticeable will be the difference.
Even in England however, there are various dialects (at least eight main ones) even though the country has been unified since the Middle Ages. English dialects are much more different from each other than Maltese ones (and it could not be otherwise) but, compared to Italian, they are little more than nuances in pronunciation.
In Malta, many people can identify the origins of another person by that person’s pronunciation of certain words. This shows that the variations are not individual idiosyncrasies but regional differences and therefore I have to concur with the linguistics professor that such differences – slight though they may be – deserve to be called dialects.
I have no objection to people using dialect as long as they do it spontaneously. It is however most irritating when done ostentatiously, as a sort of perverted snobbery.
[Daphne – I know what you mean about the ‘perverted snobbery’ and the irritation it causes. My own particular bugbear is when people say ‘ghax jiena Ghawdxi, ta’, to which the only possible (mental) reaction can be: ‘Ar’hemm hej, zutt!’ I suppose we can say, then, that Maltese is essentially an Arabic dialect. It certainly fulfils all the conditions you lay out above, though time and cultural distance eventually led to its being classed as a separate language.]
Hmmm, still discussing our beloved ilsien art twelidna are we? I think we should all spend the next two months reading Dionysius Agius’ “Siculo-Arabic”, a masterpiece of linguistics, just to get a few basic facts right. The chap is switched on, and works in the UK (Manchester or Durham University, if I remember correctly), and the book is the last word on the origins of the Maltese language. Turns out we’ve been taught quite a few lies at school. But that’s by the bye.
I knew Franco Farrugia from my Tom Brown days, and he means no harm, Daphne. Did his best to turn us into gentlemen, but even then, he was fighting a losing battle against the yob tide.
[Daphne – Do you have the ISBN number for that book? I know Franco Farrugia means no harm, but I have problems handling self-righteousness. That’s my shortcoming, not his.]
@John Schembri,
I use pilota, vakanza and ajruport – for heaven’s sake mitjar and bdot were invented after people were using ajruport and pilota, or did we already use those words for pilot and airport when the arabs were still here?
[Daphne – I might be hopelessly wrong about this, but I think that the word ‘bdot’ is seafaring terminology. Ships were piloted into port long before planes were piloted in the air.]
I remember when ‘mitjar’ and ‘bdot’ first started being used on television in the seventies. It was the same period that Britannia Street became Melita, Putirjal was referred to as Bieb il-Belt, Kingsway was renamed Republic Str and Prince of Wales became Manwel Dimech Str.
Oh, and of course, in Floriana we also had Beltissebh instead of Lintorn Barracks.
[Daphne – And with majestic irony, ghalliem became ticer.]
It’s Dionisius, not Dionysius. My mistake.
Here you go:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Siculo-Arabic-Library-Linguistics/dp/0710304978
H. P. Baxxter posted this comment and it went into the spam folder (it happens a lot with comments containing links – an over-zealous filter), so I’ve cut and pasted it here.
It’s Dionisius, not Dionysius. My mistake.
Here you go:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Siculo-Arabic-Library-Linguistics/dp/0710304978
Amazon says it’s temporarily out of stock. Does this mean it’s out of print? Does anyone know the author or where he can be reached?
amrio: ‘sigarett’ reflects the correct pronunciation of ‘cigarette'(which, anyway, is a French word)so it’s less problematic than blekbort, gerzijiet, xorz, and so on, which are spelt incorrectly because they reflect incorrect pronunciation.
http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/history/profile?person=AgiusDionisiusA
He’s currently at Exeter University:
http://www.huss.ex.ac.uk/iais/staff/agius/
[Daphne – Now that’s what I call service.]
Another attack from Zurrieq ; http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=74846.
BTW I think BRAJKU is/was a dialect , I think some people from Gharb used to communicate in this dialect which probably originated from Hebrew : “EBRAICO”.
(Daphne – You would have thought that he would have bothered to find out how ‘vowel’ is spelt.)
@ David ; Ajruport was inexistent before WW2 there were some flights from Ta’ Qali I believe by Ala Littoria(?) . A real good airport was Luqa Airport , There were a lot of ‘runways ‘ Karwijja , Hal-Far , Qrendi , Ta’ Qali and Xewkija (built in record time) The British after the war wanted to ‘give’ us something which did not cost a lot but at the same time made us feel proud so they wrote “MITJAR” which is perfectly Maltese and people like you found it hard to use.
Daphne’s word “iddomm” fits perfectly the exam question , I would have used “issensel” but I know that in Arabic “sensiela” means chain.
BTW :Xmara is of Sicilian origin : the Sicilians pronounce an X instead of an F eg: fiori becomes (X) Sciuri , so Fiume then Fiumara then Sciumara = Xmara.
Back to work
I’ve just seen that letter by Joseph Ellul. He says he was mistaken for a Londoner. I wonder what type that was…
Mr. Farrugia strikes back!
See: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20080908/local/dialects-flaunted-at-gozo-activity
(Daphne – The best bit is towards the end of the little video, where the sindku says ‘tenkju, tenkju’. Is that in the brajku dialect, too?)
when will this woman fuck off? DAPHNE, GET A GRIP!
[Daphne – On what, Muscat’s eggs? He must have stopped counting them by now, surely.]