Now those are what I call letters to the editor
I’ve been following this correspondence in The Times – which one, it goes without saying: the one without letters from sanctimonious God-botherers, cheapskate tourists complaining about the beach and informing us that they will never return, and whingers who treat the correspondence columns like a consumer complaints bureau. I think it has particular relevance to our own language situation, and the problems people here have dealing with the switch from Maltese (shallow spelling) to English (deep spelling, in which words are not so much read as recognised as whole symbols). Anyway, read on.
From The Times, August 8, 2008
We mustn’t give in to those who can’t spell
Just because students can’t spell ‘their’ and ‘truly’ doesn’t mean we should accept variations that break all our useful rules
Vivian Cook
So English spelling is in the dock once again. This time it’s students who write “thier”, “ignor” and “arguement” (and obviously don’t know how to use a spell checker). The solution? According to Ken Smith, an academic at Bucks New University, we should now tolerate variant spellings. Students are now incapable of learning the spellings of “their” and “truly” that countless millions have mastered over the centuries. So let’s change our attitudes to spelling to help this deserving minority.
Two important things are left out of this argument. One is that English spelling does have a system. The silent “e” in “tone” shows that the preceding “o” is long; the lack of “e” in “ton” show the “o” is short.
And so on with all the other vowels: “Dane/Dan”, “pin/pine” etc. (The exception is TV commercials for Danone that pronounce the name to rhyme with “salmon” in breach of the silent “e” rule.) If we allowed odd variants like “ignor/ignore”, this would obscure the silent “e” system in English. Better to teach people the real rules of English spelling, not folk myths about “i” before “e”, which at best affects 11 common words.
The real advantage of a sound-based system like English is indeed that anything can be read aloud – as newsreaders demonstrate with foreign names, such as Solzhenitsyn and Pervez Musharraf in the past couple of days. As the system has been around for centuries, it has stuck with various anomalies, like the 11 ways of saying “a” – “age”, “bad”, “bath”, “about”, “beat”, “many”, “aisle”, “coat”, “ball”, “beauty” and “cauliflower”. The only languages that don’t have such problems are those with “shallow” spelling systems that were standardised comparatively recently, such as Finnish.
English is called a “deep” spelling system because of rules like silent “e” and because it treats words as wholes. When we’re reading silently, we don’t read words like “the” and “of” letter by letter; we recognise them as wholes, just as we recognise a Nike swoosh or McDonald’s golden arches. We go straight from the whole word to its meaning without passing through the sounds. We recognise the two hundred or so most frequent words of English as shapes – and we couldn’t read silently at speed if we didn’t. But reading whole words also applies to the famous oddities like “lieutenant” and “yacht”: we store them as one-offs and don’t work out their pronunciation letter by letter.
If we made the spelling of “they’re”, “there” and “their” interchangeable, we would be ignoring all the aspects of English writing other than sounds. The three forms fit into sentences in very different ways; the difference in spelling helps us to see the structure of the sentence.
Spelling makes distinctions that are impossible in speech, such as “whole” versus “hole” or “beech” versus “beach”. Reducing writing to a pale shadow of speech is impoverishing the English language.
There’s nothing very unusual about using whole words: it’s how Chinese works. Speakers of the different Chinese dialects can understand each other in writing even if they have different words for the same character. An educated Chinese speaker knows about 5,000 characters; a dictionary has 40,000. Surely we can manage a few hundred unique words in English? Memorising the spelling of the hundred most common words of English would mean that you spelt at least 45 per cent of the words correctly in any piece of typical writing, quite a useful start.
One type of variation is between styles of spelling. Look up “judgment” or “minuscule” and the preferred spelling varies between North American and British dictionaries and from publisher to publisher. It’s a matter of identity; use “color” and you’re American, use “colour” and you’re British. The most common type concerns the consonant doubling rules of English – “embarrass”, “accommodate”, “desiccate”. “Supersede” and “definitely” are probably examples of one-offs where you have to remember the word as a unique whole.
Before adopting greater tolerance to spelling, we need to take many factors into consideration, not just how letters go with sounds. And we need to take far more people into consideration than UK students.
The majority of people using English in the world are not native speakers and live outside English-speaking countries. Any change will have to take their needs into account, in particular the need for a consistent spelling system with constant word forms rather than something based on native speakers’ pronunciation and characteristic spelling mistakes.
Vivian Cook is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University and author of Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary (Profile Books)
From The Times, August 27, 2008
Spelling bovver
English is complex
Sir,
Vivian Cook’s interesting letter (Aug 8) explains that one of the rules of the English spelling system is that “the silent ‘e’ in ‘tone’ shows that the preceding ‘o’ is long; the lack of ‘e’ in ‘ton’ shows the ‘o’ is short”. I must assume that Mr Cook is tone-deaf, as if he is referring to the weight measurement of ton, the pronunciation is as though it were written “tun”, which is how it was spelt and spoken in the days of Shakespeare.
Mr Cook’s rules are generally not rules. The famous i before e, except after c, is broken more times than you think. Consider such common words as eight, freight, neighbour, reign, vein, weigh and ten others; 15 exceptions in total. All these have to be learnt as special cases.
To suggest that there is a system of rules governing the spelling of English is sheer poppycock. The learner of English, both native and overseas, has to contend with two alphabets (the Japanese have three, but they call them syllabaries) and about 3,750 special cases that have to be memorised one by one (in order to be proficient in Japanese, you also need to memorise about 4,000 Chinese characters). Thus learning English spelling — not the spoken language, a separate skill — is almost as fraught with difficulty as Japanese is. Little wonder that about 25 per cent of the English population is technically illiterate, unable to complete forms or CVs with confidence, and thus excluded from jobs that require a reasonable degree of literacy.
Lucky are the Finns who take six months to master the written form of their language with 99 per cent literacy.
Jack Bovill
Chair, the Spelling Society
From The Times, August 28, 2008
Tautly taught
We can learn how to spell
Sir,
May I respond to Jack Bovill, of the Spelling Society (letter, Aug 27). My brother and I, aged 7 and 9, were evacuated to the US in 1940. In spelling bees there, we always came top. We had been taught rigorously and had learnt easily by rote. We simply accepted the oddities of English and coped with them.
Any move to simplify our spelling will only add to the confusion. Words such as taught, taut, tort, caught and court will lose their precision and etymology, especially in written work. And on which dialect would “new” spelling be based (bath to rhyme with hath or garth)?
Many teachers now are themselves unable to spell properly. Even worse, when they spot errors in student work, they are discouraged from making corrections. This is a sad state of affairs.
We need to get back to “proper” tuition for young children and immigrants. Above all, do not tinker with spelling. Let it be.
Michael Plumbe
Former chairman, Queen’s English Society
Hastings
86 Comments Comment
Reply to Guzeppi Grech Click here to cancel reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TKDcHEcE8Q&feature=related
the magic ‘e’ as taught by Tom Lehrer
The problem with trying to set up a phonetic spelling system is that people pronounce words differently so what is ‘phonetc’ for one person is not so for another.
This is one reason why I do not agree with the tendency we find in Maltese today, especially as regards ‘Maltese’ spelling of foreign loan-words.
That’s why we have an International Phonetic Alphabet. It helps us to pronounce the word correctly. Of course, it helps to know how to articulate the sounds of a particular language.
This one made me laugh for weeks… a billboard with “Budget Sod” glaring at me on my daily trip to work. What’s a ‘budget sod’, I thought. How do you become one? aahhh……silly me!
[Daphne – Budget sod! Hilarious – anyone out there with a picture? This brings to mind the man who posted a comment on another thread here, chastising somebody who pointed out that Claudine Baldacchino, the MLP MEP candidate, mentions on Facebood that she was born in the Year of the Ox. He clearly thinks that the Chinese name their years after bodily orifices rather than animals.]
I still didn’t get the “budget sod” joke. Yes, I’m thick.
[Daphne – ‘sod’ as in grumpy old sod, poor sod, or sod off. A budget one, I imagine, would be the equivalent of a budget hire car or a budget hotel – the point being that any English-speaking, non-Maltese-speaking person who saw a billboard emblazoned with the legend BUDGET SOD would have only one interpretation.]
aha! Now I get it! The billboard was in Maltese!
Don’t want to turn this into a Maltese vs English language debate but I find the ‘Maltese first and only language’ brigade as annoying and dangerous. Dangerous because they risk railroading politicians into taking decisions to ‘protect’ the local language. I find it anachronistic that any Maltese going to Univ has to have a pass in Maltese. Sorry, but then what is the use of having English also as an official language? I always made sure that my son knew English well from his very early years. My reasoning is that when he comes to learning other subjects, he will have to learn them in English so there is no point in being handicapped there. The result is that today he passes his English tests with ease while others struggle to cope. For this they probably have to thank the do-gooders who protect our language even at the expense of handicapping our children in their future studies.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hamallu
Unrelated, but pretty funny.
[Daphne – Yes, the spelling, grammar and punctuation are hilarious. ‘Bleech their hair’? ‘U’ for ‘you’? ‘Beat up citroens’? I didn’t know that beating up cars was something these people did for fun.]
@Baxxter – I’m sure you’ve seen signs for ‘Ass Manager’ in offices every now and then :)
Do the French need english to learn and teach Physics and Math? They speak French and teach in French at their universities, and you don’t expect them to lecture you in English just because you’re a foreigner. Ironically, France has produced some of the most brilliant scientific minds. They had no handicap even though they do not use English.
I have learned Maltese first and foremost and I never had any difficulty (or handicap) in passing exams and doing well. Each language is perfectly suited to expressing ideas and thoughts. It is all a matter of notation, grammar and vocabulary.
I also happen to be a student who has studied a bit about NLP (Natural Language Processing), which is one of the most prominent fields in Computer Science today. It is the science of programming a computer to understand human languages and make sense out of them. I can assure you, that a computer can be used to infer meaning from ALL languages. If a machine can infer the same meaning/s from Maltese, I’m sure a human can do it without finding any difficulty.
[Daphne – John, the French don’t teach in English because French, besides being a mainstream language and the international language of diplomacy, is also spoken by a nation of several millions. So the French have their own textbooks, academic papers, films, books, etc etc. The Maltese, on the other hand, do not. You can’t teach biology or chemistry at tertiary level (or even at secondary level) off a Maltese-language textbook because there is no such thing, nor should there be. Where is a biologist planning to work if all he can speak is Maltese? Maltese is a minority tongue, and as with all minority tongues – very, very minority – those who speak no other are seriously handicapped.]
@Mariop
I agree that the requirement for maltese at university is absurd.
I confess my boys don’t know a word in maltese, though they are brilliant in the sciences, will they be deprived of a place in our Malta university? They are as maltese as the next maltese, why deprive the country of possible top scientists, doctors, architects, artists etc ?
It’s not a major problem for me, I can afford to pay their way into a top British University, but it is a shame that others who are not so lucky may not get the education they deserve because of this absurd requirement for a language which is virtually extinct in some parts of the island.
[Daphne – If my sons got the Maltese examination qualification they needed to enter university here, two of them at the first attempt, then yours can. And they didn’t go to private lessons from the age of eight, either. They just had an hour a week of after-school tuition with Temi Zammit, and only in the final year of school. It helps that they didn’t have one of those mothers who builds Maltese (along with duttrina) into a major life-obstacle to be surmounted or surpassed. They knew that a pass was expected of them, that there would be no sympathy or tolerance of any excuses. You mentioned elsewhere that you live in Malta. Then how in heaven’s name do your sons not know a word of Maltese? Are they completely isolated from contact with others? Your sons can resit the examination all the way through sixth-form college, which means that if they fail first time, or second, or third, they can have a go for two year’s worth of sessions. If they don’t succeed in passing after two years of attempts, then it’s not their knowledge of Maltese which must be put in question, but their IQ. If they are ‘brilliant at sciences’, then they are going to have no trouble at all, unless you encourage them to develop a mental block about it, as some parents seem to enjoy doing. My own attitude was: if this is the hoop through which you must jump, then bloody well jump through it, because all you need is a 5 not a 1, in terms of grades. On the other hand, I agree with you absolutely that it is absurd to insist on a pass in Maltese for entry to a university where the language of instruction and debate is English. Worse still, non-Maltese students are exempted from fulfilling this requirement. I wrote about the subject a few times, taking care to do so only after all three of my sons had secured a pass in the hated examination, so that nobody could come back at me with the accusation “You’re only saying that because…”]
Mela issa ma niktbux ‘Sale’ fuq il-vetrini tal-ħwienet, għax inkella l-Franċiżi jaħsbu li l-ħanut ‘maħmuġ’. U jekk tmur salumeria Taljana u forsi trid tixtri l-butir, ma jsemmuhx ‘burro’ ma jmurx xi Spanjol jaħseb li qed jinbigħu l-‘ħmir’…
U meta Malti jmur jiekol l-Ungerija u jkun irid jiekol papra, l-Ungeriżi ma jiktbux isem il-papra bil-lingwa tagħhom, għax inkella jinqala’ kjass kbir….
[Daphne – X’il-madoffi ghandhu x’jaqsam! L-Ingliz u l-Malti huma t-tnejn lingwi ufficjali ta’ dan il-pajjiz, u ghalhekk, jekk tikteb BUDGET SOD fuq billboard hawnhekk, jista jinqara fiz-zewg lingwi UFFICJALMENT b’tifsira kompletament differenti. Imma forsi inti wiehed minn dawk li jahsbu li l-gvern huwa obligat jikkomunika bil-Malti biss, li fil-fatt muhiex il-kaz.]
Daphne / Sisi – I don’t mean to be a damper about the “budget sod” business.
I remember seeing the posters a few months ago, but I think that they read “bagit sod” (Maltese spelling, it would seem). I remember trying to figure out what “bagit” meant for a few seconds, since I read it “in English” myself … then again, maybe there were two different lots of posters.
See this:
http://www.budget2008.com.mt/index2.html
[Daphne – Bagit? OK, children – this is how you spell BAGIT in Maltese and this is how you spell BUDGET in English. And then we wonder why they never learn how to spell or write.]
@John Meilak – assuming that you have a passing knowledge of French, I’d bet you would have a whale of a time puzzling out the grammar and meaning of words in a physics textbook while you should be trying to understand the concepts involved. That process is what I call a handicap.
there’s also Zammit Clapp Hospital for naughty men :)
{Daphne – Women get the clap, too. Ask Philip Carabot to tell you just how many do.]
Children, children! Calm down now. According to our hallowed Akkademja, it shouldn’t even be “budget”, if they’re writing in proper Maltese, but “bagit”.
And nope, there are no maths and physics papers in French. The last time you had scientific publications in French or German (THE languages of acadaemia before the Yanks got smart) must have been the 1940s.
In academic conferences and seminars, even in supposedly language-puritan France (must be the mother of all stereotypes, that) people will speak English whenever there’s a foreigner present.
Most of us, including myself, were never taught proper English, so we have to make a conscious effort to speak and write it correctly.
On the other hand, an Indian or Pakistani (sorry, ‘Asian’) will never think of English as a second language, even though most of them speak with an atrocious accent. We Maltese, with our legalistic bullshit about an “official” and a “national” language, are shooting ourselves in the foot.
These are examples of the horrendous level to which English has sunk (having been extracted from a news report regarding arson in the UK – http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Mansion-Fire-Friends-Of-Missing-Teen-Kirstie-Foster-Send-Messages-Praying-She-Is-Still-Alive/Article/200809115090821?lpos=UK%2BNews_2&lid=ARTICLE_15090821_Mansion%2BFire%253A%2BFriends%2BOf%2BMissing%2BTeen%2BKirstie%2BFoster%2BSend%2BMessages%2BPraying%2BShe%2BIs%2BStill%2BAlive ) :
” “An I hope they dont find any mor an your just havin a week somewer with your dad or sumink.”
Another friend, Danielle, also referred to Kirstie’s three horses – Scrumpy Jack, Breezy and Bramble – which were found shot dead in the mansion’s outbuildings.
She wrote: “I miss you soo much. My thorts are with you 24/7 and there are some points in the day i just wanna break down and cry.” “
Virtually extinct in some parts of the island?!! Christ Mariop, where do you live? Brilliant in the sciences, are they? When Oppenheimer travelled to Holland to deliver a public lecture, he learnt Dutch.
@ Daphne – ‘On the other hand, I agree with you absolutely that it is absurd to insist on a pass in Maltese for entry to a university where the language of instruction and debate is English’.
Wasn’t this really absurd condition temporarily lifted for a year recently for very shady reasons?
[Daphne – No, not quite, but almost. The A-level Maltese requirement for the law course was lifted for a ‘window’ of three years or so – if they had lifted it for one specific year only, it would have been too obvious – with no explanation given. Of course, the reason why leaked out within days: it was done to accommodate one of the grandsons of a former president, who proved incapable of passing that exam yet wished to join the law course halli ikompli d-dinastija tal-avukati tal-kriminal. In the event, he flunked the law course, too, so all that trouble was in vain. There’s only one possible candidate with that sort of brass neck and sense of entitlement, the same one who had a wood-fired pizza oven installed in the San Anton Palace kitchens so that said grandson and friends could have fresh pizza at 4am after a night out. When my eldest son spoke to a student counsellor at the university four years ago, before deciding which course to take, he was told, “If you want to study law, this year is the last chance to get in without A-level Maltese, ghax imbaghad taghlaq it-tieqa.” Wink wink. Unbelievable. No wonder grandpa is such good mates with Mintoff.]
“On the other hand, I agree with you absolutely that it is absurd to insist on a pass in Maltese for entry to a university where the language of instruction and debate is English.”
This is quite incorrect, we have lectures in Maltese and we get along fine. It is only when there are one or two foreigners that the lecture is done English. So, consider this: minorities of the majorities are buttlicked in Malta and the majority of the minority is ignored. I have always said this and I will keep on saying this: we Maltese lick too much for our own good. That is why everybody ignores us.
Who listens to simpering servants anyway.
[Daphne – The language of instruction at the University of Malta is English, and if some lecturers are lecturing in Maltese, they are abusing the system, perhape because they are uncomfortable expressing themselves in English (which speaks volumes about their quality) or even worse, because all the students they are addressing struggle with English as a foreign language and prefer Maltese. I was at the university here for five years, and not once did any of our many lecturers address us in Maltese, regardless of whether there were ‘foreigners’ present or not.]
Au moins un sujet intéressant. Quelle différence avec les kyrielles écœurantes habituelles
Je comprends qu’il est permis d’écrire en n’importe quelle langue, pourvu que Madame le comprenne. L’anglais n’est pas essentiel- elle le dit- pour avoir reçu une bonne éducation.
Je m’en fiche si on réussit à détecter quel P.C. a été utilisé pour envoyer ce message, ça ne me fait aucune différence
Emploie un traducteur si tu ne comprends rien à ce message.
Je m’adresse à toi et non au public.
Courage!
Le Clan
[Daphne – It’s that so-and-so Philip Dupuis/Sal Parcing again, friends. Now he’s Le Clan. He clearly hasn’t found another computer with a different IP address: “Je m’en fiche si on reussit a detecter quel PC a ete utilise pour envoyer ce message, ca ne me fait aucune difference” (sorry, couldn’t be fagged to fiddle with all those accents). “L’anglais n’est pas essential – elle le dit – pour avoir recu une bonne education”? Actually, Sal/Philip/Clan, I said the opposite. “Emploie un traducteur si tu ne comprends rien a ce message”. It’s ‘vous’ to you, if you don’t mind, and I happen to have been extremely good at French thanks to the efforts of one of the most gifted teachers I ever had, the late Major Diacono, who took me on for a couple of hours a week despite being retired (he was a neighbour). Thanks to him – my teacher at school was hopeless – I sat my French O-level at 14 and scored an A. I can’t converse or write a treatise after all these years, but I sure as hell can read your rubbish. “Je m’adresse a toi et non au public.” Well, tough titties, darling. Go and toi-toi your dog or your maid, and while you’re at it, surely that should be ‘publique’?]
@ Daphne
“You mentioned elsewhere that you live in Malta. Then how in heaven’s name do your sons not know a word of Maltese? Are they completely isolated from contact with others? ”
As you know it is not uncommon for kids in some area to speak no “maltese” at all, or just a few scant words, mostly vulgar. Their friends are not much better! So what? They have no interest in maltese (which is after all arabic in disguise). Why should they be forced into after-school tuition in maltese if they’re not interested? I am not ashamed of this. My boys are as maltese as the next boy. One can argue that the language they speak is as maltese as is it can be. If they are maltese , then the language they speak is maltese, if you get what I mean. No country can “copyright” a language.
I am not arguing about the beauty of native maltese, and of arabic which I studies myself and love, however why should I impose a foreign language on my children if they are not interested? That is tantamount to child abuse, I would rather make a few more sacrifices and pay for their tuition abroad. The irony of all this is that they can get into any foreign european university without learning the native languages under EU law, and yet they cannot get into their own maltese University. Boh!
And then there is MSN language, which is another language of its own. I would think MSN type language will soon take over from english as a written language. And why not? It’s a more practical language for communication , and is more econical than the english language. I am confident that we will see MSN evolving as a main language , perhaps superseding both english and maltese.
[Daphne – You shock me, which is difficult.]
@ Baxxter – erm….I didn’t say that. Put your glasses on :)
@Amanda Mallia – if you want to see some mangled English, try reading ‘No Country for Old Men’
@LONDON AREA
Hate me if you must, but I think that living in Malta and ‘feeling Maltese’ and then not knowing a word in Maltese is shocking… not to say elitist.
If someone feels at ease speaking English all the time, well, fine for them… but not knowing a word of Maltese (except, and I quote you, vulgar ones, is just ridiculous, and speaks volumes of the supposed intelligence of such people.
A fellow workmate of mine is 100% English born and bred, yet he came to Malta around 7 years ago, married a Maltese girl, and now speaks in fluent Maltese!
And here, we have LONDON AREA who is very proud that his children do not speak a word of Maltese (except vulgar ones). U ejja!
Vraiment tu as presque tout oublié et n’hasardes pas de le montrer. Tu es confuse quoi écrire. « Tu », est familier ; « vous », utilisé en signe de respect. Tu saisis ? On tutoie ou on vouvoie selon l’interlocuteur ou la personne. Tu connais quelque chose de plus à mon sujet, maintenant. Tu n’es pas si exceptionnelle que tu le prétends. Il ne faut pas juger les gens sans les connaître. C’est ton défaut. Voltaire est probablement ton préféré. Dis-moi qui tu lis et je te dirai ce que tu es.
Monsieur Diacono ton professeur, tu as eu de la chance d’avoir eu un si bon, je le connais bien. En effet on se connaissait et on était même amis en son temps. Il était plus âgé. Il possédait un diplôme français si je me rappelle bien, de l’université de Bordeaux.
Comment j’ai appris le français, c’est mon affaire non la tienne. Je ne me vante pas en citant mes professeurs.
Sachant que tu connais le français, -je n’avais aucun doute,- la réputation de certaines personnes les précède – cela m’encourage à l’écrire pour ne pas être traité de nigaud en anglais. Compris ?
Reste calme ! Ne t’en fais pas ! Au moins puis-je me vanter d’avoir réussi à irrité ton « moi/ego » ? C’est ma satisfaction. C’était mon but. J’avais un grand dégout de tes écris et ceux de tes ami/e/s. C’était insupportable. Je l’ai presque réussi en anglais, ta réaction le démontre, je l’ai fait en français et il y a eu une éruption soudaine de l’intérieur du volcan. Pauvre femme. Deux peuvent jouer au même jeu.
Continue à dénigrer, à vomir contre ceux dont tu ne souffres pas la présence. Invente des appellations à ton gré, un « Tit for tat ! », comme disent mes amis Anglais ne m’est pas désagréable. Tu as rendu publique ta haine, c’est sur tes pages qu’il convient mieux de répondre. Le défi est lancé. Je suis moins rude et sais mieux comment réagir sans exagération. Très simplement.
N’emploie pas une lentille pour chercher des fautes, c’est fort possible d’en trouver, j’en ai trouvé dans une œuvre d’Alexandre Dumas père, et l’éditeur s’en est excusé, alors ce n’est guère difficile d’en trouver dans mes écrits.
Un membre du clan
[Daphne – Oh look, it’s Philip Dupuis/Sal Parcing/Jacques Bouchet again. Another nuttily obsessive stalker to add to my impressive collection of iffissati weirdos. Friend of Anthony Licari, are you? Lucky man.]
“An I hope they dont find any mor an your just havin a week somewer with your dad or sumink.”
Am I the only one appreciating the minimalistic way this sentence was constructed and the effective way it was delivered?
What makes this language any less deserving of credit than your more classical english?
I’ve read some of his type of MSN speak, written by my daughter in her MSN signature, and I find it fascinating how she can relate a whole event in just one line, whereas in the classical type of english I know it would take me at least a couple of paragraphs to say the same thing, without the same effect.
Pure class.
[Daphne – You’re joking, right? Pure lack of class, you mean. You don’t need a couple of paragraphs to say: “I hope no more bodies are found, and that you are not dead but away with your father for a week.” This girl is innumerate, too: there were three people in the house, two of them were found dead, and she hopes two of them are still alive. Give me a break.]
Ara jekk fhimtx tajjeb? F’l-universita ta’ MALTA mhux suppost jaghlmu bil-Malti? Mela jekk ma’ nistax nitghallem bi lsien art twelidi f’l-universita ta’ Malta fejn ix-xjafek nista’ mmur biex nitghallem u nifhem kollox, inhallas il-privat? Din kbira li wiehed ikollu jitqanna juza l-ingliz ghax fil-lecture room hemm barrani li ma’ jifhimx bil-Malti. Ara jippruvax xi hadd jitlob hekk lill-Francizi jew lit-Taljani f’pajjizhom!Lanqas jikkalkulawk, ikomplu ghaddejjin u jigu jitmelhu minnhekk jekk fhimtx jew le.
Kemm ghadna laghaqa!
[Daphne – Tell me something, John. Why do I always seem to find this confluence of factors in the same person: excessive patriotism, excessive Catholicism, excessive obsession with Maltese, excessive obsession against English and excessive support of the Nationalist Party? Usually, there’s excessive racism, too, but that would send the person’s politics tipping further towards Azzjoni Nazzjonali. People like you haven’t woken up to the fact that the Nationalist Party is no longer what it was in the 1930s. If you really feel this way, you’re definitely supporting the wrong party and should choose a more inward-looking one. Let me spell this out for you: the reason why the language of instruction at the University of Malta is English, not Maltese, is because the whole point of a university education is widening your horizons, broadening your outlook, and improving your prospects. You can do none of that without knowing, and fluently, an international or otherwise widely spoken language. The books in the university’s library are all in English (with the obvious exception of those related to particular courses like language), academic papers are published in English, and, when students graduate, they have to communicate well using English or end up like Anglu Farrugia. It has NOTHING to do with laghaqizmu. It has everything to do with improvement of the mind. When I was at university here – for five years – there were students who literally hadn’t a clue what was being said, in English, by their lecturer. They should never have been at university in the first place. They were incapable of reading the set texts, still less the recommended literature. Their essays were pathetic, almost to the point of being frightening. Lack of access to English films, books, newspapers, journals and magazines – to international thought, in other words – had actually truncated their intellectual development. The mind doesn’t develop in a vacuum, but those Maltese people who know no English exist in just such a vacuum. Maltese is spoken by fewer than half a million people, and at least 100,000 of them don’t even live here, and as for the rest – they include people like London Area, raising his children to know no Maltese.]
Daphne – Re budget vs bagit, the funny thing is that in the official govt website address is spelt “budget” (in the link on this discussion), and yet – throughout the document itself – it’s spelt “bagit”.
Maybe the people responsible for the document/website weren’t too sure of the correct version, and decided to have it both ways.
[Daphne – They say Jason does that, too.]
Oh bugger, sorry MarioP. Honestly. My brain’s messed up today. I meant to fire my barb at London Area. (London Area? Tsk!)
@amrio
” I think that living in Malta and ‘feeling Maltese’ and then not knowing a word in Maltese is shocking… not to say elitist.”
I think YOU are the elitist, and a smack racist as well.
What you call maltese is no more maltese then what my children speak.
What you cannot comprehend is that have no right to impose your language onto my children because I am as maltese as you and I pay my taxes like you do.
You doubt my children’s intelligence, I challenge you on this, I am confident my children would run rings around yours any day, if they intelligence is anything like your own.
[Daphne – I can’t understand why you’re setting your children up to have disadvantages that can be avoided. There’s no doubt that being perfectly fluent in both English and Maltese is very advantageous in this country. If they want to live somewhere else, fine – but why limit their choices?]
London Area – It is not spelling words in the most simple of ways purely to save time or space, but more a case of being unable to spell properly in the first place. How, otherwise, would you justify the spelling “thorts” (for “thoughts”), “sumink” (for “something”) and so on?
Jack Bucket or Jacques whatever you chose to call yourself this time – You constantly refer to yourself as a member of “the clan”. If that is a reference to the KKK (Ku Klux Klan), then it should be with a “k” – and it would make you an even bigger wacko then you have come across as so far.
@Daphne “people like London Area, raising his children to know no Maltese”
I did not raise my children to know no maltese.
I raised my children to respect the weak, to be kind, to enjoy the sciences and sport and tolerate the diverse.
The language they speak is the language they find in their environment. The adapt to this environment and learn their language accordingly. Once again I repeat, this is NO less maltese then what “maltese purists” demand. A language is what you make of it, their own form of “pepe english” has its own beauty, its own creativity and diversity that you would find in any other “pure” language.
Daphne, we are not all white or black, some of us are brown, thats not the point, thats not what determines how maltese we are or not.
I think you secretely agree with me Daphne. I think you are so conditioned by years of ridicule about your lack of maltese that you have learnt to be defensive and overplay your confidence with the maltese language. This is pretty obvious from the laboured way you write your maltese. I would shudder to hear you speak it! However you have no need to be ashamed because you are no less maltese than John Schembri. And you should be proud of what you are and not what language you speak (or don’t speak)
[Daphne – I don’t agree with you, secretely, secretly or otherwise. The way I write and speak Maltese is the way I write and speak English: it is not laboured, but formal, and grammatically and idiomatically correct. I prefer English because I love the subtle differentiation in meaning between words and the choice of thousands of nouns and verbs. You are so accustomed to hearing Maltese spoken and seeing Maltese written by lower-middle-class and working-class people, that you’ve forgotten there exists another class of people who speak formal, accentless, old-fashioned and ‘sanitised’ Maltese. I come from such a background. My parents grew up speaking nothing but Maltese at home, but it’s not the sort of Maltese you’d hear on Super One or Net, or see in the political papers, I can assure you. You would, however, class as laboured anything that is not the slapdash MSN-speak you so admire. An example of the laboured use of language, purely for the purpose of illustrating for your benefit a word you seem not to understand, is Anthony Licari’s columns in The Times. For an example of the laboured use of Maltese, pick any political newspaper on a Sunday and turn to the columnists. If your children have brains, make sure they use them. The more languages they know, and correctly rather than in patois, the better – whether Chinese, Arabic, Maltese or Finnish. I don’t consider the ability to speak and understand Maltese as a sign of patriotism or national pride of some sort, but as a sign of intelligence. If a person has grown up in a country where X language is spoken by the vast majority, yet somehow never learns it, then obviously, questions arise about his or her IQ. I don’t have a low IQ. I actually have quite a high one, besides a highly-attuned ear for words and idiom. So it stands to reason that there is no way on earth that I could have lived in Malta for 44 years without learning the language fluently. That is the hole in the argument of those who accuse me of this particular shortcoming, including yourself.]
@Daphne – ” I can’t understand why you’re setting your children up to have disadvantages that can be avoided. There’s no doubt that being perfectly fluent in both English and Maltese is very advantageous in this country”
Maybe because sometimes in life you have to stand your ground and do what you think is right, and hope it all turns out OK. Otherwise you would lose credibility with your own children and give a bad example. I guess you know what I mean because you’ve apparently done a decent job with your own minors.
[Daphne – I have no minors. They’re all in their 20s. OK, so maybe you regard Maltese in the way that I regarded duttrina and religion lessons in which children were taught how much better Catholicism is than every other faith.]
I’m trying hard to think of the words to use to describe
London Area and I can’t find them. He’s left me completely
speechless. This is either his idea of a joke or I
really don’t know what to call him.
[Daphne – Try using MSN-speak. There’s lots of choice there.]
Is there anything wrong with teaching children both languages? Or better still, to instil a desire to learn or at least appreciate as many languages as they can?
@Daphne – “The way I write and speak Maltese is the way I write and speak English: it is not laboured, but formal, and grammatically and idiomatically correct.”
I am afraid its not Daphne, its the kind of maltese you would desperately put together to scrape a pass in the Matsec.
Look at John Schembri’s post. For all his racism he shows the same confidence and artistry with the maltese language that you have with your own mastery of the english language.
Not that yours is that bad really, I would guess you got a 3 in your Matric, same as me.
[Daphne – That’s where you’re wrong. John Schembri’s Maltese is lower-middle-class in the same way that his English is lower-middle-class. Unfortunately, these things can’t be discussed while treating the dreaded C word as the elephant in the room. As I pointed out before, it has become generally accepted, largely because the arbiters of these things come from that same social background, that lower-middle-class and working-class Maltese are ‘good’ and ‘official’ Maltese but the Maltese spoken by Malta’s ‘old’ families is not, even though it is grammatically and idiomatically perfect. The decline in formality since 1971 – make that the deliberate assault on formality – is apparent not just in the disappearance of basic good manners and civility, but even in the rise of working-class Maltese to supersede the more formal Maltese that I remember being spoken more widely. The absence of an accent when speaking Maltese is now so unusual that shopkeepers and similar feel they have to respond to it in broken English, because they make an accurate mental link between Maltese spoken without a village accent or lower-middle-class accent and the sort of person who speaks English. I imagine, from what you say, that you would consider a speaker of Estuary English to be more fluent in the language than his queen. And not to put too fine a point on it, I didn’t just pass O-level Maltese, but was given an A. Apparently, I was the only 15-year-old sitting that exam who knew that there is a specific verb for threading beads.]
“an even bigger wacko then you have come across as so far.” – THAT SHOULD HAVE READ “THAN”. SORRY!
Frans Sammut is missing out on this one
[Daphne – Frans Sammut ran away when we began discussing his son Mark Anthony’s little problem with a gun in his handbag at airport security, and his other son Jean-Pierre’s obsession with North Korean and strange machines. On reflection, he seems to be the most normal member of his family.]
@John Schembri
Remember that English is one of our official languages so you must not consider its use in the university as some kind of affront to your patriotism.
The legislators who drafted Malta’s Independence Constitution had a reason to declare English an official language – they knew how vital it was that we continued to regard it as ‘our’ language together with Maltese. People used to take pride in their English, without feeling that they were betraying their identity as Maltese. Even Mintoff, for all his anti-foreign rhetoric, maintained the status of the English language.
It is most unfortunate that we are assisting to a seemingly unstoppable decline in the standard of spoken and written English, though, from what British friends tell me, this is happening in Britain as well so it’s not just a local Maltese issue.
I think the way people speak English will go on deteriorating unless every single teacher in both state
and private schools speaks perfect English with a perfect
English accent. Otherwise what chance do the majority of
children have? Because of tv, computers etc., they hardly
ever read good books. But even that isn’t enough if they
then don’t know how to pronounce the words. We’ll just
hear more “yallow epple” and horrors like that.
[Daphne – This ‘yallow epple’ (another one is ‘hendbug’) business highlights one of the biggest stumbling-blocks: the vowels. I read an interesting newspaper article recently about how our ability to differentiate between subtle and not-so-subtle differences in vowel sounds is formed in the first few MONTHS of our lives by listening to the conversation around us. Apparently, in adulthood it becomes virtually impossible to learn how to differentiate, for the first time, between – for example – the many and varied ‘a’ sounds in English, unless the adult has a particular flair for mimicry. Adults whose mother tongue has similar vowel sounds will find it easier, but those whose mother tongue has very different vowel sounds (Maltese/English) never will. It actually is impossible for them. And all their parents had to do was play the BBC World Service next to their crib…but we didn’t know that at the time, did we? Interestingly, it also explains why Maltese speakers can’t ‘do’ Maltese accents which are not their own without sounding fake. And why the vowel sounds of those who speak accentless Maltese are actually so close to English.]
John Meilak: Why is it ‘licking’ to speak English well and to use it as the language of instruction at university here? Even if, for argument’s sake, the motivation for using English in class were to curry favour with a former colonial power, how would speaking, reading and writing English properly put students here at a disadvantage in the wider world?
There are plenty of university courses that are taught in English in countries whose first language is not English. They’re not all ‘lickers’, are they?
Here’s another thought: Many Swiss people speak at least three languages yet people from different cantons often use a fourth as their common language. It is – surprise, surprise – English.
[Daphne – You are assuming that John Meilak knows there is something called a wider world. Interestingly, he spells his surname with a k, not a q, presumably to make it easier for the former colonial power to pronounce it.]
London Area: ” I would guess you got a 3 in your Matric, same as me.”
Actually, that should be “…,just as I did.”
@Daphne “the decline in formality since 1971 – make that the deliberate assault on formality – is apparent not just in the disappearance of basic good manners and civility, but even in the rise of working-class Maltese to supersede the more formal Maltese that I remember being spoken more widely.”
Beautifully described Daphne – You get an A+ for this contribution, and also for the enlightening historical accounts you gave above. Great pieces of work. Thanks and Prosit!
“there is a specific verb for threading beads”
Really, There is? Must be derived from bixkla…so what could it be? Tbexkil? Wow!
Come on…give it up..what is it??
[Daphne – Iddomm iz-zibeg. Clearly, you didn’t have a grandmother who kept you happy doing that when you were five.]
@Daphne
“they should never have been at university in the first place.”
I assume they were mature students, otherwise how on earth did they get in?
Come to think of it don’t you need A-level English for law? How did half the law students get in?
@John Schembri
“F’l-universita ta’ MALTA mhux suppost jaghlmu bil-Malti? Mela jekk ma’ nistax nitghallem bi lsien art twelidi f’l-universita ta’ Malta fejn ix-xjafek nista’ mmur biex nitghallem u nifhem kollox, inhallas il-privat?”
Hanini, l-Ingliz huwa ilsien art twelidek ukoll!
@London Area
“Am I the only one appreciating the minimalistic way this sentence was constructed and the effective way it was delivered?”
Yes!
[Daphne – They certainly were not mature students. The mature students, when I was there, spoke and wrote perfect English because they tended to be mainly from that kind of background or had enough experience of working life to build up a sound knowledge of English. The problem was with the 18-year-olds. Not only were they unable to use English, as opposed to scrape a pass in their O-level to get into university, but they had been trained all their lives so far – by their parents, duttrina teachers and at school – never to question anything they’re told and they had no idea how to construct a coherent argument. They were at a complete disadvantage.]
@Daphne
“the language of instruction at the University of Malta is English, and if some lecturers are lecturing in Maltese, they are abusing the system, perhape because they are uncomfortable expressing themselves in English”
That is definitely the case, unfortunately some “lecturers'” English brings you close to tears, at least in the IT department. As for their quality …..
We had one so called lecturer whose mummy brought him to university each day, complete with snoopy lunch box, (he was 35 at the time)and whose idea of a lecture was reading straight out of a book – word for word.
His exam papers were EXACTLY the same, year after year. I learnt the subjects he taught from the internet!
[Daphne – My god, 35 years old and still being driven around by his mother with a Snoopy lunch-box. He sounds like one of those men with a particular interest in the pre-pubescent.]
@Daphne
“My god, 35 years old and still being driven around by his mother with a Snoopy lunch-box. He sounds like one of those men with a particular interest in the pre-pubescent”
Well, he is very muzew oriented … He administers several catholic websites too!
Needless to say he is single. Anybody who read for a degree in IT KNOWS who I am referring to!
[Daphne – I would definitely not like to know the kind of sites he browses at night. I used to work with somebody like this, except that the ‘mother’ was his wife. She drove him to the office every day, with a neatly-packed lunchbox (no Snoopy) and came to pick him up on the dot of 5pm. He kept the nail on his little finger very long (to pick his nose? open envelopes?), wore a long beard and looked like he had spent the last 40 years raised in a dark cupboard. Then one fine day he took the adventurous step of going on a press-trip to Bulgaria, the first time he had been anywhere, done anything or met anyone, and the next thing we knew, he had run off with his Bulgarian minder. At least she was over 12.]
“Iddomm iz-zibeg”.
YES!! Let me issue an explicitive here! MADOFF!!!
You’re right….I have heard it before, when I was very very young. But I couldn’t have recalled it on demand for the life of me.
You might perhaps think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not, I’m actually very pleased to “recoup” something that, albeit is useless, is nonetheless somehow mystically part of my existence. Can’t really put it in words. Lets just call it the magic of nostalgia, superfluous as it may be.
So, I have to say thank you to DCG for giving me this small gift. Who would have guessed; certainly not me!
[Daphne – It’s an expletive, actually. Secondly, the verb ‘iddomm’ is not useless at all, because we still thread beads to make necklaces and for other purposes. People always seem to be astonished that I know words and phrases like this, despite the fact that I repeatedly explain that I come from a Maltese-speaking background: proper Maltese, that is, not the working-class Maltese that has become the accepted idiom nowadays, and which is by definition far less accurate and polished, like working-class English. A rather well-known former journalist who grew up in a Labour family in Zejtun was once speaking to me about some household job and mentioned a ‘scalapiedi’. What on earth might that be, I asked. He stared at me: it’s a ladder. I had never heard the word in my life (I don’t really do Italian). Oh, I said, we call it a ‘sellun’. It was his turn to stare. Sellun? What’s that? I thought this was quite strange.]
David Buttigieg: Why do so many people like that end up in IT?
[Daphne – That should be obvious. They find it difficult to form relationships with other human beings and so they commune with their computers. And the sex is so much better than anything they would get in real life.]
That was a rhetorical question.
@Corinne
“David Buttigieg: Why do so many people like that end up in IT?”
Huh!!!
I forgot, he always wore the same large tennis shoes every day – he was s sight!
Seriously, he was/is the joke of the IT students – to be honest people like him are a minority even in IT, most are incredibly classy, handsome, intelligent, hip individuals such as yours truly – ahem!!!!
Ghaziz David ,mela issa gejt fejn ridtek meta ktibt” Hanini, l-Ingliz huwa ilsien art twelidek ukoll!” Dik l-“ukoll” tfisser hafna u nghidlek il-ghala : ghax jien jekk jien Inginier tajjeb u ma’ nafx hafna bl-Ingliz ( li jien qatt m’attakajt)kif nista nsaqsi lill-ghalliem tieghi biex iffisirli x’hinu jghid b’l-Ingliz. Jien il-Matematika u l-Fizika ghallimhomli Father John Booth , ma’ nistax nghid li fil bidu ma’ batejtx!
Fl-universita taghna, il-Malti m’ghandux jigi mbarri biex min ma’ jafx bil-Malti jkun vantaggat. L-istudent Malti li ma’ tantx jaf bl-Ingliz ghandu DRITT jistaqsi fejn ma’ fehemx bil-Malti u ghandu dritt jikteb bil-Malti.
Nittama li l-idea li jien noqghod ghal kollox , warrabtuha.
Issa Daphne spiccat qisha Fredu Sant meta kien jaghti l-marki lill-kunsilli lokali . Dak “lower Middle” jien gibt A u ghamilt “five years at the university”
F’kelma wahda tridha ta’ “examiner” biex hadd ma’ tghaddilu mill-kanali ta’ mohhu il-mistoqsija ” hi proprjament x’taf?”
Haga wahda zgur minna : ghat-tghajjir hadd ma’ jirbhilha , “with flying colours ” tehodha d-diploma , jew Cum Laude.
[Daphne – Describing somebody as lower middle-class is not an insult. If you choose to take it that way, then fine. I don’t agree with you that people should have the right to ask questions in Maltese if they don’t understand English. If they don’t understand English, they shouldn’t be at the university. If they don’t understand English, it means they can’t read any of the texts they are expected to read, no journals, papers, or even useful internet sites. If they can’t understand English, then we can conclude that their level of education/knowledge/awareness is abysmal. Students don’t have the right to ask questions in Maltese because they don’t understand English., They have the right not to be deprived of at least one language that will give them access to world outside their village.]
David Buttigieg – What is it with these single men in their 30s and their lunchboxes with children’s favourite characters?
My children had a male music teacher who was single and aged around 35, who struck me as “odd” from day one, though I could not put my finger on the reason why. (He seemed pretty normal in every other respect, though I somehow didn’t like the fact that he CHOSE to teach children as young as 4 or 5.)
I was always fishing from my kids, just in case, because as the Maltese expression goes “Ma’ daqqli xejn.”
There was – amongst the girls – a craze of exchanging “cute” stickers; Mr Music used to “collect” them too, apparently.
Alarm bells started ringing louder when I heard from one of my children – and eventually confirmed through another parent – that Mr Music had a Barbie lunchbox.
That really got me worried, for obvious reasons. I was about to take the matter up with the school (not because of his “hobby” or lunchbox, but because of what it inferred). Before I did so, however, the school must have caught up on it, because apparently, he was eventually asked to leave.
Daphne – I remember that guy, and he was really a “tal-Muzew” type. It just goes to show what repression can do to you.
As for “sellun”, you’d be pleased to know that apparently it has got corrupted somewhere along the way and now appears in your nieces’ Maltese textbooks as “sellum”, with an “m”. I simply can’t stomach it. (Please, please, please, Frans Sammut – Do come out and correct me, telling me that it has always been spelt with an “m”.)
I thought it was ‘sellum’ ending with an M .It is heard as an N but is an M.
There is “skalapiza” , never heard of “skalapiedi”.
I did not get an A in Maltese.
[Daphne – It could have been skalapiza. I had never heard of either word, and haven’t since. If it’s pronounced sellun then why is it spelt sellum, given that Maltese is pedantically phonetic?]
@Corinne and Daphne
I hope you don’t think that all IT people are like that! As you know, I work in IT, and most of us have normal lives (including sex!)
OK, I admit it, there is a minimal percentage of weirdos (could be that the guy you are mentioning above, the lecturer, used to work with us a number of years ago), but hey, these things happen in the best of families, no? :)
@Daphne
BTW just noticed from your answer to Guzeppi. I think a ladder is sellum, not sellun. Of course, I know it’s a typing error…
[Daphne – No, it’s not a typing error. It’s pronounced with a final ‘n’, and given that Maltese is phonetic, it should be spelt with a final ‘n’. If the Akkademja think differently, they can go ahead and spell it with an ‘m’. I am way beyond sitting for matriculation and O-levels, so basically it’s up to me whether I want to dot my cs or put an n in sellun, or spell blackboard as blackboard rather than blekbort. These are not things that developed over time, but are the result of a bunch of people sitting down a few years ago and deciding on spelling according to how they saw fit. Well, I can do the same.]
@Daphne
and double BTW, Italian must be my third language, and scalapiedi does not exist! A ladder is scala in Italian…
[Daphne – John Schembri pointed out that it was probably skalapiza. I’d never heard that, either.]
@ Daphne “When I was at university here – for five years – there were students who literally hadn’t a clue what was being said, in English, by their lecturer”
That’s exactly my point , as a lecturer you were not communicating with your students, they felt inferior to you because your English is perfect ,and they never asked you to elaborate or explain in Maltese; their mother tongue.
I am not asking for “Malti Safi” in our university lecture rooms/halls, but here we are back to square one when in-Nazzjonalisti were pro Italian and l-Istricklandjani pro-British & Maltese.
I believe that together with English -which is a very important language- Maltese has a place in our University because it is the mother language of most of its students. Foreign students who do not understand Maltese should understand that they are in a foreign country , and when they do not understand they ask for an explanation in English.I have Polish friends here in Malta learning Maltese.
In the seventies we at MCAST had to follow our lectures in English because we had three Rhodesian students in our course, one of the Rhodesians could not understand what was happening , his two compatriots tried to help him while we waited during the lecture. After the first year he dropped out.
Same did some of our Maltese classmates.
In the nineties I attended an evening coarse in Electronics , we were all Maltese , the explanations were all in Maltese even though technical words were in English and remained in English , one would not expect the word ‘rectifier’ to be changed to RADRIZZATUR but we were learning , and THAT is the purpose of going to school or university.
I travelled quite a lot around the globe , and wherever I went I always noticed that the mother tongue of the country I was visiting was placed FIRST on a notice or a sign , not in Malta.
Shouldn’t we be proud of our language ? As the saying goes “if you don’t use it you lose it”.
You call it “excessive patriotism” , I call it sense of national pride.
BTW : the K in Meilak is a kind of Q , in the semitic languages they have various guttural sounds , some people from Cottonera & Xewkija cannot pronounce the Q and instead say K. People from Gharb pronounce the GHajn with a soft K different from the Cottonera K.
[Daphne – Here we have the perfect illustration of how lack of familiarity with colloquial English puts people at a disadvantage. I never said I taught at the university, because I never did. In the phrase ‘when I was at university’, the words ‘as a student’ are IMPLIED. I was talking about my fellow students. Our lecturers taught in English, and when a student asked a question in Maltese, our regular professors used to stop, look stern, and say, ‘Please ask that question in English.’ It had nothing to do with ‘licking’ or with a sense of linguistic inferiority. It was ACADEMIC TRAINING. The language of academia is English. It’s true that the French study in French and the Italians in Italian, but if they want to break out of their borders, they need English. We are at a huge advantage in that respect, and somehow we are doing our best to turn it into a disadvantage. You can’t compare an evening course in electronics with a bachelor’s or master’s degree course. The first is utilitarian training – who cares what language it’s in as long as the trainees understand their instruction and don’t fit the wires the wrong way? – but the latter two are all about the broadening of the mind. You can’t broaden a mind using Maltese. Sorry, but that’s a fact.]
@To David Buttigieg
“What is it with these single men in their 30s and their lunchboxes with children’s favourite characters?”
I don’t know, I did wonder a couple of times but ofcourse if he tried anything at uni he would have been beaten to a pulp.
To be fair I never heard of any stories at all about him, I think it was just a case of being completely ruined for life by his darling mummy.
@ Daphne : Skalapiza is a step ladder which leans against a wall , my aunt had a wooden one leading to the roof top.
About the M in “sellum” : if Maltese is phonetic why don’t we write “biep” for door.
‘mhux se nhallilek helwa ghal-morra fuq din’.
While browsing in the internet I found a Maltese dictionary website introduction with this title : “Ftit kliem mingħand l-awtur ” instead of “kelmtejn mingħand l-awtur” , “ahbarijiet ta’ l-ahhar” instead of “l-ahhar ahbarijiet” I feel like crying or laughing, Kilin and George Mifsud Chircop must be turning in their grave.
[Daphne – I agree with your last point. In the days when I bought the political Sunday newspapers, I used to sit there sighing with a highlighter pen, marking all the mistakes, literal translations and stupidities. In the end, I just stopped buying them. The language used was so strange and unfamiliar to any Maltese I knew. As for ‘bieb’, the final sound is not a ‘p’ but halfway between a ‘p’ and ‘b’. I certainly don’t pronounce it ‘biep’.]
@John Schembri
As Daphne said
“Its true that the French study in French and the Italians in Italian, but if they want to break out of their borders, they need English”
And the Italians and French and Germans etc all desperately try to learn English. Take Malta – why do you think language schools thrive here? Now I KNOW that the students mainly come to have a good time but their parents pay a LOT of money to send them here, and I am talking about at least 1000 euros a week.
And believe you me that most German, French and other non-English speaking teenagers speak better English than half the teenagers (and adults) in Malta.
@ David : I don’t know how you find my ‘lower middle class ‘ English , but I literally broke the borders with it in my field. My problem at first was that other people’s English was sometimes incomprehensible especially in places where the letter F is pronounced as an L . I can only tell you that the English which we speak is not the spoken English which the common English people speak in everyday life. The last time I visited Chalgrove I asked an employee how he finds my English “Be. er den moyn”was his prompt reply.
This reminds me when an Italian engineer asked us from which country one would think he came from when he spoke English, a colleague unhesitatingly (cruelly) replied “Zimbabwe!”.
Having never been taught maltese, I still know that its
bieb not biep because its then bieba, like hobz abnd hobza
(not hops).
With regard to notices and signs, street signs are now
in Maltese ONLY, very difficult for tourists.
[Daphne – And for the rest of us, too, including the postmen and postwomen, especially when you get translations like Sappers Street as Triq L-Inginieri.]
On local radio”issa ser indoqqilkom wahda ta Michael Boulton il favorit ta’ hafna nisa feminili Maltin!”
[Daphne – Maltese radio….I love it. “Issa minn gewwa Londra..” Minn gewwa l-kexxun, qalbi. “Dan il-programm huwa migjub lilkom mid-ditta X.” Aaaarrghh!]
LOST IN TRANSLATION:
1) in Zurrieq there is Sqaq il_fjuri. Now how on earth in Zurrieq they named Flower Street ? I was told that Zurrieq being a place with some five windmills needed a name for FLOUR , the street naming committee mistakenly wrote Flower and someone else later translated it to Maltese :Sqaq il- Fjuri.
2) BULL Street Bormla , it was named after someone with Bull as his surname (he was a knight I think), later translated to Strada Toro and now Triq il-Barri.
3) Christopher street Valletta , it was Strada Cristoforo and someone turned it to Saint Christopher Street. Cristoforo had to be a saint to have a street named after him no?
“Kellna konkorrenza qawwijja” , when they mean “Gew hafna nies”
“Varjazzjoni ta’ kuluri” , instead of “Varjeta” or better still” Ghazla ta’ lwien/kuluri”
The overall winner is Radio 101 : “ESKURSJONIJIET” instead of “hargiet ”
[Daphne – Morna kofi mornink bil-prajvitt.]
X’kofi morning …………..! MORNING COFFEE !!! Like CHRISTMAS FATHER . NO? And what about GOALER now that IS Maltese for goalkeeper we should write it “gowler” , Do not ask me the Maltese plural for this word.
[Daphne – It’s easy to work out how it became ‘morning coffee’ (and it’s not the biscuits). Coffee taken in the morning becomes ‘morning coffee’ – the descriptive word goes before the noun. It’s the same with Christmas Father – ‘Christmas’ is thought to be the descriptive word used for ‘father’ when people are unfamiliar with the concept of Father Time and Father Christmas and Mother Earth. Goaler: being bored to bits by football, I always thought this was a reference to the person who scores the goal. It makes more sense: the person who scores the goal is the goaler, while the other is the goal-keeper.]
@ Daphne : the word “goaler” does not exist in the English language. In Malta we always refer to the “goaler” to what the English call “keeper” or ” goalkeeper” .
[Daphne – I know it doesn’t exist in English. I thought the ‘Maltese’ version is used to describe somebody who scores a goal – that would be a goaler. I didn’t know it was used for ‘goalkeeper’. Maybe it’s a corruption of goalie?]
Another thing d.j.s, announcers and their guests do that really bugs me is put the emphasis on the adjective and
not the word – SOFT drink being a favourite. One elderly
singer/d.j. makes this mistake all the time and then has the
gall to constantly correct his listeners’ pronounciation
in both English and Maltese.
[Daphne – You mean SOOOOHHHHHHFFFFFT drink.]
amrio: No, I didn’t know you were in IT. I’m not sure I even know your real name.
To be fair, English speakers sometimes make me groan too, the most classic word being Spinola – It should be pronounced Speenola and not Spinowla (excuse the phonetics)
This appeared on today’s BBC online
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7595509.stm
Meerkat sent in this interesting link to a grammar story on the BBC website today. It went into the spam folder, so I’m copying it here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7595509.stm
John Schembri / Daphne – With the (groan) Akkademja tal-Malti Maltese version of “goal” being “gowl”, one could probably safely assume that the Maltese word for “goalkeeper” is “gowler”.
Whilst talking about football (the official Maltese version of which is – ahem – “futbol”), you might like to know that one of my 8-year-old daughter’s school books uses the word “grawnd” for “football ground / pitch”.
Quite frankly, I’m sick of it, and can’t bear to see such hash-ups any longer. It can only get worse.
@Amanda : my problem is the plural for GOWLER. For gowl it is gowlijiet
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1051805/French-minister-finally-admits-defeat-battle-English-language-claiming-secret-success.html
Please read this article – it should silence the anti English brigade once and for all!!
@Corrinne Vella
You misunderstood me. I like English but I do not find any reason to speak it in my homeland. Do the Italians speak Chinese in Italy? Or do the French speak Portuguese in France? (ajma hej dawk, hah).
You mentioned that there are many countries who first language is not English and yet lecture in English. So? Shall we do the same as the sheep of ‘Bendu’? I’m referring to Malta. We others do is their business. What do I care what Switzerland does?
@Daphne’s comment
On my birth certificate it is written ‘Meilak’. Meilak (with the k) used to be spelled Meilach (Italian ch), and as such it should be pronounced as ‘Mayluck’. The k is a sharp consonant and therefore it should stress the meaning of the surname: knife sharpener.
John Meilak: You’re not one for practising what you preach, are you? Your comments are are (mostly) in English. That’s no bad thing.Do you feel you are at a disadvantage for having said what you did in the language that you used?
No, I didn’t think you’d care what people in Switzerland do (as opposed to what the state does). That is part of the wider world which you seem so keen to ignore. I quoted the example of people in Switzerland to drive home the absurdity of the argument that we should only use Maltese (read: reject English) because we are Maltese and in Malta.
You claim you see no reason to speak English in Malta (I assume that’s what you meant by ‘homeland). No one has said that you should do so, though I imagine you recognise that if you were UNABLE to do so you’d not have become involved in this debate at all.
The difference between our respective lines of thought on the matter is this: you see language as a statement of one’s nationality, patriotism, historical political allegiance, etc. I see as a means of communicating what one thinks and understanding what others say.
Maltese has its place – we agree on that much. So does English, and that’s where we differ. There is no harm in using English as the language of instruction at university. There’s plenty of harm in making a point of excluding it because that runs counter to what a university is supposed to do – open one’s mind to a wider world.
John Meilak,
“You misunderstood me. I like English but I do not find any reason to speak it in my homeland.”
That is fine BUT why should others be criticised if they choose to act differently? What you speak is quite frankly your business? BUT Malta should not be handicapped by the “Malti qabel kollox” attitude!
Also, the Italians do not speak Chinese in Italy, nor the French Portuguese in France (See my link above about the French by the way) BUT
1. They both desperately try to learn English
2. We are NOT talking about Portuguese or Chinese but English – you know, the most important language in the world
3. Their language is a language of millions and not the equivalent of a small town abroad, hence even though handicapped, they are less handicapped then a Maltese who doesn’t speak English!
Allow me to quote some of the above link
“For generations, the French have fiercely guarded their language against the horreurs anglais.
But France’s education minister yesterday admitted for the first time that the secret to success is speaking better English.
Xavier Darcos claimed poor English is now a ‘handicap’ because all international business is conducted in the language, and said French schools would offer extra lessons during the holidays.
He also admitted that, because of globalisation, very few people outside France will being able to speak French in the future. “
@ John Meilak : mejlaq is a sharpening stone.It can be used for knives , scissors shears etc , and also for stone masons and carpenter tools the latter use an oilstone.
if you want some REAL juicy meat for an entry on english language howlers, check out the consultation paper doing the rounds that the kamra ta’ l-avukati wrote…while extolling the need to restore the legal profession to glory and all that, they manage to misspell ‘practise’ a zillion times and mangle so many idioms and phrases that you could almost call in the red cross…
(Daphne – Which consultation paper is this?)
The one that will evolve the Maltese republic into a fully-fledged lawyerocracy, led by a cadre of ascetic lawyer-monks who don’t participate in society for fear of smudging their clean togas…
http://www.chamberofadvocatesmalta.org/chamberofadvocates/news_detail.aspx?id=90126
[Daphne – Professional regulation is a good thing, not a bad one. Here’s the consultation document. You can download it, read it, and send in your views to the Chamber of Advocates.
http://www.snapadministration.com/snap28102005/files/chamberofadvocates/633560429372865000.pdf ]
The only comment I could send the people who wrote that docuemnt is to eat humble pie and enrol in an EF english language course for beginners.
I’m surprised that you’re not pouring copious text online ridiculing professional wordsmiths who can publish such literary gems as: “It is time to face the stark reality around us and to cease closing the Nelson’s eye on our own deficiencies”
Could it be out of deference to one of your regular blog contributors who also happens to be involved quite a bit in the Chamber?
Are you turning a Nelson’s eye yourself?
[Daphne – To what?]