Why do people who speak only Maltese speak it so very badly?
I suppose it’s because they’re uneducated. Speaking only Maltese is evidence of that. A properly educated person would speak at least one other language well because it is only through that other language that they can have access to an education.
I am fascinated by how badly people speak who speak only Maltese and have little knowledge of any other language. Their sentences are ungrammatical, their vocabulary is limited and the thoughts expressed are truncated and basic.
Seeing Joanne Cassar’s ‘nihu (niehu) l-engage’ this morning set me off thinking about that again.
Niehu l-engage? I know that entered the vernacular years ago, but why do speakers of only Maltese use it? It’s a good way of illustrating the point I’m making here: educated people who speak at least one other language properly besides Maltese say ‘titgharras’ while the uneducated, who speak Maltese and nothing else, say ‘tiehu l-engage’.
Equally fascinating is the verb, which really reflects the mentality of the over-riding culture: ‘to take (for oneself)’. Becoming engaged to marry is seen as a form of personal acquisition of something tangible (the ring?) and not an agreement to marry.
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I saw a horrible one yesterday along the lines of: “I went shopping, but my toddler didn’t stay (sic) and I had to leave”.
Ah, language! A favourite hobby of mine.
Here are two gems from the venerable Maltese tongue:
“Tiehu l-engejc” BUT “taghti l-konkos”.
Another fascinating one is “Kemm jaqbdek?” as in “What tax rate (or amount) are you required to pay?”
How about “ninvita” instead of “nistieden”? I generally ask if a screw driver is needed.
Issa ghandha l-unur li hi l-ewwel mara trans li hadet Gieh ir-Republika.
Ma jonqosna xejn.
Who are these people who were given medals today?
Valentina Ivanovna Mathvienko (honorary companion)
Alain Dutheil (honorary officer)
Margrith Lutschg-Emmenegger (honorary member)
Abdurazagh Ismail Zmirli (honorary member)
Valentina Ivanovna Mathvienko (honorary companion)
– Chairwoman of the Upper House of the Russian Federation and former (1990s) ambassador to Malta.
Alain Dutheil (honorary officer) – Chief Operating Officer of STMicroelectronics
Margrith Lutschg-Emmenegger (honorary member) – Fimbank president
Abdurazagh Ismail Zmirli (honorary member) – Gaddafi-ite flotsam from Malta’s Mintoffian past, which is now of course the present.
Anzi ma kitbitx li “se nengagga” – illum saret moda fil-Malti li ddawwar il-kelma Ingliza engage u tikkonjugaha bhalma tikkonjuga verb Malti.
This is similar to saying ‘sa’ nixtri’ meaning I’m pregnant and nothing to do with Christmas shopping ‘ghall-Krismis Fader’
These expressions have always given me shivers as has ‘festin’, tini naqa’ and many others
‘ser tixtri’ is derived from ‘hlas’.
[Daphne – Yes, more ignorance, unfortunately, because that’s ‘hlas’ as in ‘hlist’ and not as in ‘hallast’: in other words, to drop the physical abdominal burden rather than to pay for the baby.]
Subsequently it derives from from ‘hels’ not ‘hlas’
My mistake, never been there.
This says it all
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-11122013-AP/EN/3-11122013-AP-EN.PDF
‘ Bwiets’ or is it ‘bwietz’ is another coined word I simply find hilarious or should I say tragic.
The double-plural par exellance. I wonder if anybody says “butsijiet”.
It’s all about ignorance. The one I hate the most is “mind you fall hi”.
Malta: ignorant today, more ignorant the next.
And this person is viewed by many as enlightened mind you.
God help us all; clearly we are not capable of helping ourselves on this rock of limited mental capacity.
Which is why, presumably, Muscat seeks to flog EU-Malta passports in the hope that some ‘talent’ will rub off on its way to the lands of opportunity.
Actually her Facebook post is not that bad as far as Maltese Facebook posts go. The spelling mistakes are there, but they are not as egregious as those of many other Facebook users from similar backgrounds.
Just look back at the Zurrieq major’s “epitazers” or whatever the heck he had written. Oh, and I remeber commenting on a doozy that appeared on this site a whole while ago; “selfestin”.
And how about my pet hate? The misuse of double letters. This seems to be an epidemic among government school educated Maltese. Frankly, I cannot understand what’s so difficult about determining where you should place a double letter and where you should not, but this type of mistake is so common and so consistent that I cannot help but wonder if there is some particular teacher who is teaching it wrong.
Allow me to add my pet hates.
Tenk you hafna
Nixxi instead of nixtri
Tenk you lilek
Tini gixx basktijiet hi
That is nearly as bad as these wannabe hipsters that purposely spell “the” as “teh” but that silly trend seems to be passing these last two years.
Hundreds if not thousands of government officials can’t even write a couple of paragraphs in good English let alone a full report. I know because I had people half my age, all graduates, telling me “ghax ahna Maltin ta”.
And yet when I used to tell them to write their reports in Maltese if they felt more comfortable with Maltese..they couldn’t.
That’s what we got from that pumped-up junior college called Tal-Qroqq.
That, I think, is the crux of the argument. Although educated in the sense of ‘I have a degree’, the people remain uneducated in the sense of ‘I know about something’.
On the other hand, you will find people with no tertiary education (usually older persons, who were prevented from learning due to the times they lived in) who have a very good grasp of the language, because they approach things correctly.
Our university does not cater for knowledge; it caters for exam passing, i.e. parroting blindly from notes taken ad lib from lecturers with no questioning of whether the lecturer is right or wrong.
This invariably leads to graduates who can tells their arse from their elbow and the horrors of language currently prevalent in Malta.
I have just had the opportunity to listen to a clip in which one of the graduates had some situation to expose – I still cannot understand why the heck did he ever choose a language which he could barely speak.
And this, not to mention the puerile manner in which he tried to relate what he had in store.
I felt like crying in despair.
In my time, and that’s many many years ago, it would have been dubious whether he would have ended up with a ‘pass’ in the Senior Oxford School Certificate exam – let alone graduate from university.
And what about that other gem…”ser inkun brides ta”..which, I must admit, took me some time to decipher when I first came across it a couple of years back. It means “I’m going to be the bridesmaid.”
Anzi “se nkun brajs tafx!”
And the ones that drive me nuts:
Thanks very much
Invitani
‘Niehu l-engage’ – now that’s one I really cannot stomach. But it really points to a class of people who go about cutting corners.
I see this in e-mail correspondence too. Correspondence which should span three or four sentences gets compressed into a few words, no punctuation and awful, pigeon English. Some just hate writing in English so they take the easy way out and jot down a few words unaware that this only leads to added frustration and misinterpretation at the receiving end.
A true story:
Some years ago a friend of mine walked into an Ironmongery and asked for a can of black spray paint. The Ironmonger replied by asking him if he wanted spray or sprain. My perplexed friend replied “aren’t they one and the same thing?” to which the Ironmonger with a condescending look and tone replied “No spray is for metal whereas sprain is for wood.”
Oh my God. You just cleared up a major mystery that has been nagging me for years.
Other screwed up words in the same vein; bronkiterrrr, stejnler stijl, enemilju, kwiritajzer (liquidizer), ex-rejt (x-ray), l-imperial(il-period),.
The tendency is to take relatively simple words and make them more complicated to pronounce. Very curious phenomenon.
This has been happening for ages. L-Imnarja was Luminarja, Kastellanja somehow became Klistlanija, and so on.
You should work in healthcare. While I was still on the island and seeing patients, it used to be a daily struggle to understand what half of them wanted.
My all time favourite was ‘Sprain ghan-natura’. It took me a good half hour to understand that he wanted Stud spray (look it up).
“aghmel sleep, hi, qisa..” .. and internally I despair.
I suspect it harks back to another reason though. Speaking only Maltese indicates that the person left school early, or didn’t bother much while in school. Therefore all subjects would have suffered. Maltese, being the one needed for survival makes it to the barely-coherent level.
I disagree – it indicates a family that does not value education much.
I went to school in the 90s, when we were strictly forbidden to speak in Maltese outside of the Maltese lessons.
French was also compulsory for all. However, a number of people I went to school with cannot converse except in stutterings of Maltese in the form illustrated above.
On the other hand, members of my family who did not even finish primary education (World war II got in the way) speak fluent Maltese and Italian.
And what Shiv Nair? No honour found for him?
It looks like they spell it badly too.
http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/national/New-logo-launched-to-mark-200-anniversary-of-Malta-police-force-20131214
Tittowja – ‘thaw’; ‘windscream’ – windscreen
There’s a wealth of gold nuggets if we want to go into the automobile domain.
Shockupsovers, spartin pluks etc. Someone should do a dissertation about it.
I had the misfortune of accompanying a family member to the emergency department recently. I am often mistaken for foreign and spoken to in English. There were at least two other blonde, foreign looking ladies at the emergency department on that day.
The nursing aide therefore attempted to speak English, presumably to ask who was waiting to be wheeled to the X-Ray room. Unfortunately he did not specify whether he was there to wheel patients back from the X-Ray room to the corridor or to the X-Ray room from the corridor.
I am usually fairly tolerant but in a hospital setting where miscommunication can have drastic consequences, I expect employees to be able to string sentences together.
‘Gobbijiet’ (jobs). The least one could do is to model it on another similar-sounding word. If the plural of ‘zxxb’ is ‘zxxb’, then the plural of ‘gobb’ could perhaps be ‘gbub’… Seriously, there are so many people who make you think that this is a rock inhabited by many illiterates and savages.
What irritates me most is watching the news and listening to newscasters Tom, Dick and Harry invariably referring to ‘also’ as ANKA evidently derived from the Italian ‘anche’.