I work primarily on screen, where reference is to fonts and character sets. It would be incorrect to refer to Maltese characters as Maltese fonts.

About the dots and dashes, have you ever noticed that the ‘i’ has in fact a dot, as does the ‘j’. They would perfectly do without them, but they still have them.

[Daphne – I can’t understand why you are so defensive. I believe in making things simpler, not more complicated, and I understand that with people who work in your particular field, that too is the aim. j and i have dots because that is the way they are; they do not have dots to distinguish them from a similarly shaped letter with a completely different sound. English assumes a person’s ability to read a word as a picture, rather than ploughing through the syllables, and just there you had an example of this: ‘ploughing through’, with the same ‘ough’ but completely different pronunciation. Also, written English developed naturally over time and is not a language developed by committee. Written Maltese – Maltese in general, nowadays – is very much a language developed by committee and it shows. It assumes that everybody is an imbecile and must be told by means of a dot on the z how to pronounce, say, zghazagh, because otherwise we would all run around getting confused and pronouncing it with a TS sound.]

In Turkish, there is an ‘i’ without a dot, which is the ‘ı’. Did you ever notice that other languages have other diacritics, and they have a very sane purpose and are perfectly useful? Do you have an y insight into languages other than Maltese, English, Tal-Pepe, and Italian? Maltese does not come directly from English, and so the alphabet it derives from should not be by default the English alphabet, as you so think.

[Daphne – The thinking and motivation behind all languages is the same: to make communication possible. ‘Insight’, as you put it, into these other languages is completely unnecessary. It is necessary only to know that they developed naturally over time. Written Maltese is unique because it was literally invented by committee within living memory. If you were to bother looking up newspapers from the first half of the 20th century and even later, you would find that spelling involved no fancy dots and dashes and followed the Italian system. The only problem this created was that there was no specific letter for the KH (Q) sound, but it actually wasn’t a problem at all, because – just as when reading English we can differentiate between ‘plough’ and ‘through’, so people reading Maltese back then could distinguish between a C or K that indicated a KH and a C/K that indicated a C/K sound.]

Do you know the difference between the ‘ġ’ and ‘g’? And the difference between the other letters and their respective diacritic form?

[Daphne – Of course I do. Anyone who is capable of mastering idiomatic English finds Maltese extremely simple by comparison. Maltese is actually ridiculously easy compared to English (though I have the advantage of having been exposed to it from birth). Sometimes I think that all these dots, dashes and anally retentive fixations are an attempt to make a very simple language appear more complex than it is.]

Why do you think I should care how many languages you can speak with perfect idiom, my dear Daphne, and why do you consider this to be a confrontation at all? (Well, it wasn’t – now it is).

All I did was point out that you’re wrong to insist that “għaqs” is correct when it should be “għaks”. Is it so difficult to admit to a mistake, dammit? By the way, your “idiomatic” translation, “J’Alla kont taf tikteb u titkellem bl-Ingliz daqs kemm naf nikteb u nitkellem bil-Malti, qalbi” is not idiomatic at all. It should be “IMQAR kont taf tikteb…”. So much for the perfect Maltese idiom…

[Daphne – We say ‘J’Alla’, though I have noticed the attempts to eradicate this piece of screamingly loud evidence that Maltese is really just Arabic with bobs on. Idiomatic translation is NOT literal translation, Tony.]

Whatever floats your boat, but you should begin discovering your origins after half a century on earth. You really should.

[Daphne – I know my origins rather better than most.]

And just to give you a clearer view, tal-pepe, are people who have such confusion in their mind to the extent, that they can’t even identify when they should speak one language or the other, so they just speak both at the same time.

[Daphne – Actually, Alex, those are chavs with money who sent their children to private schools and bought flats in Sliema and ‘houses of character’/villas elsewhere. That’s a completely different social group, but you wouldn’t be able to make the distinction. Real tal-pepe speak either English or Maltese, and our Maltese is better and more correct than the Maltese spoken by the working-class, quite simply because we tend to have had a better education. That our English is also better goes without saying, for the same reason.]

Daphne are you serious, basing such an argument on such a great number of assumptions. This was a bad day for you, must have been.

[Daphne – They’re not assumptions, but extrapolations from a couple of decades of experience. Now, if somebody comes along and tells me that they were distracted and closed the show abruptly because the Super One chairman was having a heart attack in the wings, then I’ll reassess my views.]

Well said, Daphne.

Do you know what a font is? “Maltese fonts” have been obsolete for quite some years now, and I sincerely hope there isn’t anybody still using them today.

I wouldn’t go into the merits of Unicode, because you really wouldn’t be “fagged”, but do you know what a keyboard layout is? And do you know that other countries exclusively use keyboard layouts other than the average US/UK keyboard you are currently using? I’m not only talking about the physical keyboard with keys labelled with characters from that particular language.

Your blog is already compatible with Maltese characters, as you can see from people’s comments who used them.

[Daphne – I think it should be obvious to you that I used the word ‘font’ when I meant ‘character’. I work primarily in print, where reference is to fonts, not characters. No, this blog is not compatible with Maltese characters. It will not take Maltese characters in the headings or captions. As for all the sarcasm about keyboards and layouts, I find people like you extremely tedious. I have been working with computers since 1989, and despite my enormous age you would be seriously misguided in classifying me with the average mum who has a Facebook account. Please accept the fact that I am not interested in using Maltese characters, and swallow it whole. As I said, the person/s who decided we should have a different alphabet to the one we were accustomed to already should have been shot. Those dots and dashes serve no sane purpose. They make no sounds different to those which exist in, say, Italian, which is dot-and-dash-less. I will use the dots and dashes when writing, but I am not going to bend over backwards – even if it means adjusting my touch-typing – to stick a dash on an aitch just to keep some dead linguistic pervert happy.]

It’s actually working class people who make the worst linguistic messes, Gino.

Trid waterrrrr?
Trid taghmel toilet?
Meta ghandek il-birday?
Fejn tmur school?
Immorru niehdu coffee l-Ferries?
(A real tal-pepe person says “Trid ninzlu x-Xatt niehdu kafe?”)

The list is endless. And shameful.

Agreed, Daphne.

Has anyone in the Akkademja ever wondered why no one manages to get it right, except for those who use it to work?

Vassalli himself would be at a loss, upset at the inverted snobbery behind this sham. If the design was political, it worked, the condescendence being the perfect signature.