Daqxejn multi-taksing mat-Tuks Fors, imbaghad naghsa helwa mad-deks
It-tuks fors tas-Spettur Gadget
My, I had no idea that we are about to land ourselves with a deputy prime minister and minister of the interior who reverses the order of his Ks and Ses.
“Joe, gibli daqxejn dak il-fajl minn fuq id-deks.”
“I don’t know ta, but I’ll aks her.”
“Kemm hu bard. Qisna skoss Eksimos!”
“Issa l-prim ministru ghamel taks fors biex jiehu hsieb il-buses.”
And the prime minister points out, to great laughter in parliament (tsk tsk – or should that be tks tks – not najs, but we’ll forgive him for giving in to unbearable temptation) that it’s a task force, not a taks force.
But it didn’t work, did it.
Half an hour later, having thanked all the people who told him ‘proset’ (with an E) on his Facebook wall, Anglu Farrugia was sitting across from LouBondi (pronounced as a single word, like Blackbull in Black Bull Pub) and repeating the same subliterate mistake.
Taks fors.
LouBondi set him straight. Again. But we just know that Anglu went back home to talk about the taks force to his very impressed wife (“Kemm kont tajjeb, Ang!” URGR8T) and will go into work this morning to talk about taks forsijiet.
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Adios Berlusconi, adios!
Burlesqueoni
What are your thoughts on arjuplan vs ajruplan?
[Daphne – I don’t have views, only facts. Arjuplan and ajruplan are both correct, because they are corruptions of ‘aeroplane’ or the Italian version, depending on whether your linguistic background favoured English or Italian. In my family, we say ajruplan, because we corrupted it from aeroplane, but in Italian-inclined families, like the prime minister’s, the word tends to be arjuplan, because it is corrupted from areoplano.
Back in the dark ages, when I was a child, the word we used was aeroplane, not plane. If we used plane, it was a conscious abbreviation, and we were made to spell it ‘plane, the ‘ indicating the missing bit. Some of us elderly people still think of them as aeroplanes.]
Extremely sorry to disappoint, but it’s not AREOPLANO. It’s AEreoplano.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroplano
Well it beats “BDOTI”…instead of PILOTI and SKAWTS..instead of SCOUTS… GOWL instead of GOWL and scores of ridiculous importations.These are not corrupted words…they are raped.
We are trying to extend a language which cannot be stretched, as long as we keep sending morons to Brussels disgusied as translators who convert English into Maltese and are proud of our language.
Maltese dictionaries,(e.g. Aquilina) accept arjuplan as a variant of the more common ajruplan.
In Italian it’s spelled aeroplano but Italians never pronounce it as ‘eroplano’; it’s invariably ”areoplano’, at least colloquially.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=datGWzKyd8k
(the word is at 5 seconds)
As far as I know it is aeroplano in Italian. So , whether derived from italian or English , it will still be ajruplan in Maltese. Correct me if I am wrong.
[Daphne – My Italian is rubbish, so I Googled them. It’s one of those situations where the Italian spelling is either aeroplano (and sometimes areoplano) but the pronunciation is always ar-e-o-plano, hence arjuplan. You can’t actually pronounce ‘aero’ in Italian.]
Pardon me disappointing you, but I feel that when it comes to Lawrence Gonzi, sometimes you try to defend the indefensible.
You show disrespect to Italian speakers when you declare that they cannot pronounce ‘a-e-ro-pla-no’ (note the five syllables); and it’s good to know that Italian has its own translation for ‘plane’: a-e-re-o (and not ‘aero’).
Lawrence Gonzi is human, exactly like every one of us, and it’s no disgrace that he errs once in a while.
And while we’re at, I don’t have any doubt that he pronounces ‘irkotta’ and not ‘ricotta’.
[Daphne – You’re quite wrong, and my explanation is the correct one. It has nothing at all to do with defending anyone, still less defending the indefensible. The fact remains that ‘ajruplan’ comes directly from the English pronunciation, AYroplane. I think you forget that the Maltese first encountered AYroplanes through the British, because the only ay-ro-planes they knew were in the RAF.
The Italian pronunciation is completely different to the English, despite the spelling being near-identical. The Maltese of those early ay-ro-plane days came into contact with the Italian word for ay-ro-plane much later than they did the English word, and then only through television or rare conversation, and that’s why it’s more unusual than ajruplan/ayroplan. My Italian might be rubbish, but my Maltese and English certainly aren’t and no, the vast majority of Italians I have heard in airports and elsewhere do not say ah-eh-roh. They say ah-reh-oh. Also, I trust you realise how ridiculous it is to defend the pronunciation of ajruplan as the correct version against arjuplan, when both entered the language as corruptions from other languages in the 20th century. If we want to be REALLY correct, we should all call them ay-ro-planes, because we got the word from the RAF. ]
Then your ear is not attuned to Italian.
From the Sabatini Coletti dictionary:
aereo[a-è-re-o] agg., s.• agg.
1 Fatto d’aria: spazi a.
5 Relativo agli aeromobili: flotta a.; linee a.
As you can see, it is a-e-re-o … sorry ma’am.
Don`t know, never saw the word written otherwise.
Also, the majority of Italians(if not all) say “Prendo l`aerio” or “E` caduto un aerio”, thus omitting the “plano”.
[Daphne – Ah, but they pronounce it ‘ar-eo’. Italians can’t pronounce ‘ae-ro’. The first sound doesn’t exist in their language. The root is Greek, as in Aesop. It’s an ‘ay’ (as in ‘hay’) sound that isn’t present in Italian.]
I am insisting because it happens to be the Italian language ta, wouldn`t even dream with the English language with you, mela le, ara ix-xebgha li ittini! Lanqas inqum minnha zgur.
[Daphne – Yes, I know, but still I’ve never heard an Italian say ‘ay-ro’, but only ‘ar-eo’, even though it has to be spelled aero because of the Greek root. It’s one of those irkotta things, except that Italians never change the spelling of loan words despite their inability to pronounce them.
Aero is pronounced ‘ay-ro’, as in the chocolate bar. Italians say AR-EO only because they literally can’t pronounce AY-RO.]
They pronoune A – E. It’s not a diphthong, but two distinct vowels, like po-e-ta, Pa-o-lo, i-d-e-a etc.
The Maltese can’t pronounce two vowels one by the other, so they turn the two vowels into a diphthong: poweta / pojeta, Pawlu, ideja/idija … then the orthographic rules changed and confusion reigned …
Small correction. The Greek root is aeros actually (or aeres, with the second ‘e’ as an eta – a long e, depending on which dialect you’re using)
And the Italians use ar-e-oh, not ah-eh-rio, not because they cannot pronounce it, but because of their acquisition of the word. In latin it was aeris, the ae was pronounced as /ee/ so it became eeris. Then they added the o, muddled from the Greek, making it eerios and finally lost the ability to make a distinction between /ee/ and /i/, hence their problems with live (as in place of residence) and leave (as in going somewhere else)
So your conclusion is correct, I just think the reasoning isn’t.
Daphne, no. Punto. Have loads of italian friends and relatives too, They say AERIO. Listen to this.
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sugexp=ppwl&cp=49&gs_id=1a&xhr=t&qscrl=1&nord=1&rlz=1T4SNYK_en-GBMT369MT369&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&ion=1&biw=1280&bih=537&wrapid=tljp1320799594702028&q=and+pronunciation&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sl=en&tl=it&sa=X&ei=d825TomHKoK18QPtufDMBw&sqi=2&ved=0CCoQrgYwAA#en|it|aeroplane
[Daphne – This is going to turn into another irkotta debate. Pat, Italians cannot say ‘ay’. It is a vowel sound to which they were not exposed when children and so they never learn to pronounce it properly. A lot of Maltese have exactly the same difficulty, which is how the ay in ay-ro-plane became aj. The ‘ae’ sound is not ah-eh. It is ‘ay’. It is not an Italian construction. In fact, the conjunction of ah and eh is awkward and doesn’t sit naturally, which is why most Italians corrupt it further to AR-EY-OH. If you search online for areoplano, you will find that in contexts where people tend to write as they speak, they actually spell it (badly) as areoplano, to reflect their pronunciation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVfF7cAvldM
Remember that Italians did not invent or name the aeroplane. They corrupted the English name just as the Maltese did. ]
Look it up in dictionary and find the IPA pronunciation.
aèreo [a’ɛreo] agg., s.m.
1 agg dell’aria
6 sm abbreviazione di aeroplano
from http://www.dizionario-italiano.it/definizione-lemma.php?definizione=aereo&lemma=A02D5000
However, the point here is that Anglu Farrugia is subliterate. And this we know for a fact.
Does he say “kemm ghola il – petlor “?
[Daphne – Yes, he does.]
And he shook hands with Angela Merker.
my oh my and i thought that school days are ove,miss may i go to the tiolet? hahaha
I couldn’t stand hearing Anglu saying “on the record” again so had to switch channel.
He must have said it 15 times in a few minutes and he dodged every question regarding how the Labour Party would improve things for the Maltese.
It’s scary to think he’ll be the next deputy prime minister.
Well done to Lou Bondi because when i switched back to find Tonio Borg on the programme the difference between the two was really evident.