Repeat after me: GRANDCHILDREN. GRANDCHILDREN. GRANDCHILDREN. THE CHILDREN OF MY CHILDREN ARE MY GRANDCHILDREN.
This girl is their granddaughter, not their niece.
Have you noticed how the words ‘grandson’, ‘granddaughter’ and ‘grandchildren’ have almost disappeared completely from the strange English now spoken and written in Malta?
I can’t remember the last time I came across the words in an English-language newspaper published in Malta, or heard them spoken outside my own immediate social group.
It’s nephews and nieces all the way.
Because Italian and Maltese use the same word for grandchildren and for nephews/nieces, most Maltese people now seem to think that English is the same. So what, in heaven’s name, do they think the words ‘grandchildren’, ‘grandson’ and ‘granddaughter’ mean? Or have they never come across them?
Now I understand why stationeries always seem to have such an amazing choice of birthday/graduation/anniversary cards for ‘a dear niece’ or ‘a darling nephew’, and hardly any at all – except around Sliema – for darling grandsons and beloved granddaughters. I used to think it’s because people who lived around stationeries in other parts of the island have inordinately large extended families and lots of nephews and nieces on whom they dote and whose numerous birthdays they never fail to remember with a special card.
When I first began to come across all these references to nephews and nieces in interviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, I used to think, how sweet, this man doesn’t only talk about his children. He also talks about his nephews and nieces as though they are his own children.
Then I read a bit more, joined up the dots, and realised that he couldn’t be talking about his brother’s or sister’s children, because it just didn’t make sense. He was talking about his grandchildren.
It happened again this morning, when I read Kurt Sansone’s interview with Antonio Palumbo, the shipyard boss. Palumbo is Italian, Kurt Sansone is Maltese. It was a recipe for grandchildren disaster. And sure enough:
“Unfortunately, my sons have also inherited this damn passion and now also my nephews and nieces who are still children are already speaking about ships and docks. It is in their DNA.”
It is quite obvious that he is talking about his sons’ children here, and that makes them his GRANDCHILDREN, Kurt, and not his nephews and nieces.
I’ve repeated this so many times I’ve probably sickened you all and have certainly irritated even myself in the process, but here we go AGAIN.
English is very specific about these relationships and has special words for them which are NOT interchangeable or substitutable with any other.
The children of my children are my grandchildren. If they are male, they are grandsons. If they are female, they are granddaughters. The word ‘grandchildren’ has no reference to age and is used even for adults, as in the case of references to ‘my children’, even when your sons or daughters are in their 40s. Your grandchild can be 50 years old.
The children of your siblings (your brother or your sister) are your nephews if they are male and your nieces if they are female. There is no generic word which takes in both sexes, as there is with ‘my grandchildren’ (meaning my grandsons and/or granddaughters) or ‘my children’ (meaning my sons and/or daughters).
As a form of politeness, you can also refer to your spouse’s sibling’s children as your nephews and nieces, just as they refer to you as ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’ in the same spirit. But it is more usual to specify, when making introductions or talking about situations in, say, interviews, that Jane Zammit is your husband’s/wife’s niece.
The words ‘nephew’ and ‘niece’ are not age-specific. You are their aunt if you are a woman, or their uncle if you are a man.
This may seem unimportant, but words which describe relationships are specific for a reason. If Italian and Maltese did not differentiate, historically, between the children of one’s siblings and the children of one’s children, perhaps because the distinct was not socially or legally important (though I can’t see how that can be), differentiation is certainly of the essence now.
At last I understand why, growing up, I never heard any of my grandparents (all of whom spoke proper Maltese habitually) refer to their ‘neputijiet’. It was always ‘il-grandchildren’ and ‘mal-grandchildren’ or even ‘mat-tfal tat-tfal’. They needed a specific word with a specific meaning and Maltese didn’t provide one. My grandparents had nephews and nieces (neputijiet) too and needed to make things clear.
Now that I think about it, my parents – who also habitually speak proper Maltese – do the same thing. My mother says ‘mal-grandchildren’ and my father says ‘mat-tfal tat-tfal’. I have never heard either of them say ‘man-neputijiet’.
Being unclear about the relationship, or making a mistake in translation which changes the relationship entirely, can cause a real mess, not least in legislation. When I read the White Paper on rent reform some three years ago, and came across the property inheritance rights of ‘nephews and nieces’ (where it should have obviously been grandchildren because they were talking about the direct line of descent) I flagged it up on this blog and didn’t win any brownie points with the people who wrote or translated it.
And then there are the repeated death notices which say that So and So leaves to mourn her loss her beloved son John, her beloved daughter Jane, her nephews and nieces, her brothers and sisters and their children.
Poor woman, you think – she died before her grandchildren were born. And then you read the rest of the sentence and twig.
19 Comments Comment
Daphne, you are very right.
This will lead another “ricotta” debate.
This is the fault of lawyers who still use obsolete Italian legal terms.
Daphne you would enjoy these two books:
Strictly English by Simon Heffer
and
Lost for Words by John Humphreys (my favourite BBC Radio 4 journalist who left school aged 15 with some ‘O’ levels).
Then the Maltese would really hit rock bottom learning Swedish. Grandmother and grandfather are differently translated whether it’s on the maternal or paternal side. As are uncle and aunt.
Farmor – Your father’s mother
Mormor – Your mother’s mother
Farfar – Your father’s father
Morfar – Your mother’s father
Farbror – Your father’s brother
Morbror – Your mother’s brother
etc.
[Daphne – That’s fantastic. I love Swedish already. The more specific the words are, the more I like the language. The lack of specific words for different family relationships, in Maltese, makes me think that the family structure really wasn’t important here, no matter what people say now.]
We don’t even have an Arabic-derived word for “father”. Which belies all the “valur tal-familja” slogans.
[Daphne – Yes, I’ve been meaning to write about that for some time. Our word for father is a corruption of the French ‘monsieur’. Aside from the fact that this makes it fairly recent, it does rather suggest that the father tended not to be married to the mother, but kept her.]
It is more likely an adaptation of the Italian “messere” (accent on the second e) rather than a “corruption” of monsieur. French was never in use in Malta in the middle ages (as Luttrell says, Malta never really had a Norman period and the Angevin one was too brief).
When foreign European soldiers, sailors, administrators, landowners etc began coming to Malta after the end of the “Arab” period, many of them probably fathered children (in or out of wedlock) with local Arabic-speaking women who referred to the father in his own tongue as “messere” or taught their children to call him so. I imagine these local girls were somewhat submissive and considered the foreign father as superior and showed him deference. They may also have copied foreign families where the father was also often addressed as “messere” much as some American children still call their father “sir”. In feudal times, it was not uncommon for peasants to enter into informal unions – the Council of Trent had not yet hijacked marriage.
We are here in conjecture land, of course, but this seems to be the most reasonable explanation for the absence of the semitic abu for father (there is a remant of it in Bu-suttil, Bu-ttigieg, and nicknames like butwila, buzaqq etc). Some of these fathers may have been absent most of the time and the children grew up speaking Maltese and spending most of their time with their mothers and her family.
If anyone is interested in the history of language in Malta, I recommend the fascinating book by Prof Joseph M Brincat published this year. It’s a monumental work of the highest calibre.
What Paul Bonnici means by “This is the fault of lawyers who still use obsolete Italian legal terms” is beyond me.
Another irritating misuse of a word is “youth” which some insist on using even when referring to a female.
If something is not done fast, the level of spoken and written English will continue to plummet inexorably. Unfortunately, even academics are increasingly making unforgivable errors.
[Daphne – Youth. I wrote about that several times. Time to bring it up again. I’ll wait for a couple of examples from the newspapers.]
If French wasn’t in use during the Middle ages, then neither was Italian, for it didn’t exist back then. My own hypothesis is that “missier” came in much later than the Middle Ages, when the Maltese started crawling out of their caves and hovels into the newly-built cities, and kiddies could finally recognise their daddy from among the dark mass of cloaked women, siblings, goats and chickens in their communal cave.
Whatever the truth, it goes to show that the notion of Maltese nationhood from the earliest times, as propounded by heavyweights like Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, is a complete fabrication. If Malta is an independent state, it’s because of a quirk of history. The sooner we come to terms with that, the sooner we’ll shed our inflated sense national narcissism.
Those words are extremely straight forward. Farmor = far (father)+mor (mother). Morbror = mor (mother)+bror (brother). Also we have different version for cousin (kusin), second cousin (syssling) and third cousin (slips my mind right now… time for bed). Although in every day speak it’s quite common to use just “kusin” for all.
Then as a bonus we sound like we’re singing every time we speak English :)
Specificity can be overused unnecessarily sometimes, I feel.
In German every occupation or profession or any kind of – how shall I say it – human position has its masculine and feminine version, so all official correspondence is addressed doubly.
‘Lieber Patient, Liebe Patientin’ (Dear -male- patient, Dear – female – patient’… a notice in a doctor’s surgery will say (and go on to advise of early closing, or something similarly innocuous), Lieber Architekt, Liebe Architektin is how the architects’ association will address their members in their circulars.
Our old friend HC Strache published an open letter to the Austrian people in today’s newspapers starting with ‘Lieber Österreicher, Liebe Österreicherin…’.
I can understand it if there is a real need to know the gender of the person concerned but I fail to see why Strache, for example, couldn’t simply have addressed himself to the ‘Dear Austrians’.
Can any native German speakers please enlighten me about this?
Why do you specify both genders when you’re addressing a homogenous mass of ‘people’ whose gender is irrelevant?
Please do not go down the “hatni” or “silfek” way !
It is a pity that when all the world is giving English such importance and everybody wants to speak it, here in Malta the standard of the language is going to the dogs.
I feel we have (had ?) a treasure, the envy of many countries and instead of appreciating what we had, we were petty minded about its influence.
[Daphne – Oh, I don’t think the standard of spoken and written English has fallen in Malta, not at all. It’s just that very many more people are now speaking it and writing it, without first having learned it properly. Those people wouldn’t even have known a word of English a generation ago. Their parents and grandparents certainly didn’t. So it’s not so much that the standard has fallen, but that it has got high enough. Yet.]
We did not accept the fact that Maltese is only spoken here in Malta, and that a person who only speaks Maltese might as well be deaf and dumb to the rest of the world. Such a disadvantage, only understanding what happens in this confined and parochial country.
Why are street names only in Maltese nowadays? What are we ashamed of? I shudder when I remember how many young people I meet, who know no English or whose English is ‘pidgin’.
Wake up, Malta, and accept the fact that English gives us an advantage .
@DCG: you do have a point but it is a fact that the standard of Englsih expected at secondary schools seems to be much lower than it was in my time when less than 50% of candidates passed their English language “O” levels — not because their level was lower than it is today but because standards were higher and obtaining a pass-mark more difficult.
The same may be said about Italian and French.
Some things do not even seem to be given any importance any more. Punctuation comes to mind.
I meet people in possession of post-graduate degrees who often use malapropisms, bad syntax, wrong pronunciation and have a general lack of awareness of nuance between one word and another.
As for Maltese, barbarisms and linguistic atrocities are constantly heard on radio and TV.
Old chestnuts like the idea that a word of Italian origin is not Maltese are still current.
Some serious scholars do not even classify Maltese with Semitic languages any more and claim that it is a language on its own, so much has the Semitic element moved away from Arabic.
When it comes to knowledge of history, especially Maltese history, one is amazed how ignorant most Maltese are, including some politicians, journalists and even highly educated people. It is such a pity when today there are a number of excellent books on the subject.
An Arab with some basic knowledge of English and Italian, can master Maltese within approximately six months.
An Englishman who spent over 40 years in Malta, could hardly hold a basic conversation in Maltese.
This proves that Maltese could be considered as a dialect of Arabic, but now it enjoys the status of a national and official language, with very rich literature for the number of people who speak it.
“It’s just that very many more people are now speaking it and writing it, without first having learned it properly.”
That’s funny. Most of them seem to have wound up in parliament, the civil service, the law courts, university and broadcasting.
Just received this, and thought you would appreciate it :
The English Plural
We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
Let’s face it – English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England .
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don’t fing,
Grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speakingEnglish
Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship…
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down,
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an alarm goes off by going on.
And in closing……….
If Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop.?
Excellent, true and quite entertaining. Thanks!
This is fascinating! Maybe the lack of specific words for “grandchildren” in Maltese and Italian doesn’t necessarily mean that family structure is not important in Malta or Italy (this is obviously untrue to any outside observer), but rather it is indicative of the family being viewed as one big amalgamation, a collective where specific relationships are not important.
Also, it strikes me as interesting, but not entirely surprising that few distinctions are given to children (who are the least powerful in the collective), while extra distinction is given to elder matriarchs and and patriarchs (who are the most powerful). For instance, my mother-in-law Carmen is not frequently referred to “Carmina” and my father-in-law Martin was frequently referred to as “Martinu” before his death. Both of them had several names and titles within the family.
This is all speculation, of course, but it seems to me that language often denotes power.
Perhaps the lack of specific language for grandchildren indicates their lack of power within the traditional Maltese family collective.
The above made me realise that I always say ‘it-tfal tat-tfal’ and never ‘in-neputijiet’ which is so widely used on Maltese radio and tv stations – wonder why?
[Daphne – For the same reason that people in my family and my husband’s family and most of my friends’ families do, e-ros. Let’s not elaborate except to say that when people use ‘neputijiet’ for grandchildren they usually also say ‘irkotta’..]
Another Italian word which has been wrongly introduced into the Maltese language is the word ‘cognato’; this in its original language is used to refer to my sister’s husband. ‘Cognata’ would be my brother’s wife (sister-in-law) but has been incorporated into Maltese as ‘kunjata’, meaning my wife’s mother. Another case of the weakness of our language finding solutions which make it even weaker.
[Daphne – ‘Kunjata’ is used only by those who say ‘irkotta’. All others say ‘omm il-mara tieghi’. And even that is fascinating, because the use of ‘my man’ and ‘my woman’ to mean ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ indicates that formal marriage might not have actually been the norm. The Arabic word, which we have retained but hardly ever use, is ‘zewgi’.]
And then we have pure Maltese words like ‘hatni’ and ‘silfi’ which will soon be lost through non-use. I believe ‘hatni’ is actually a brother-in-law, but ‘silfi’ ?
{Daphne – Strange language, that has no word for grandchildren and the word ‘sir’ for father, but then a word for brother-in-law. Or maybe that should be ‘strange social set-up’.]
It probably doesn’t reflect the social set-up as much as the habitual misapplication of imported words. But even that is symptomatic of other underlying causes probably. It is the need to impress with the use of foreign words without having the education to apply them properly.
On another note, I don’t think this can be a ricotta/rkotta parallel. Our family uses tfal tat-tfal and frowns on the rather derogatory kunjati but still uses l-irkotta. And I’m sure we’re not alone in this. So I can’t see a pattern there. But then again, each time I winced at the nephews/nieces mangle I never realized its use (misuse) was so widespread. What really gets to me in obituaries is the ‘adorable’ grandchildren (as opposed to ‘adored’) that the deceased would have left to mourn his loss.