That we can agree on. It’s the lack of administration of post-Golden Year justice that has in no small part led us to the sorry state in which we are today.

Indeed, but the etymology wouldn’t matter if the word was precise.

In this case, it isn’t. Flixkun can be a bottle, or it can be a vial, or a magnum, made out of glass, aluminium, plastic or anything else. That level of language imprecision is dangerous in the modern world, as Ritienne found out, much to the Akkademja’s chagrin.

What would ‘chagrin’ be in Maltese?

You really ought to keep Ritienne in check, you know. She’ll be the death of you one of these days.

“Flixkun”

As in “Ritienne qabdet il-flixkun immarkat bl-iskanetru, mimli valenu, li s-ser tal-kemistri kien pogga gol-fjumkabert, u minghajr ma harset lejn il-wornink miktub fuq il-wajtbort, bil-perminintmarker u l-hajlajter, qabdet u xorbitu. Kellhom jaghmlulha gestrik levigg, imma salvat.”

[Daphne – And ‘flixkun’ is itself a conflation of ‘flasco’ and ‘flacon’.]

Mrs Caruana Galizia, I disagree. The Maltese word for avenue, used for various decades pre-1971 and the “purification” of the Maltese language, is ‘Vjal’, derived from the Italian ‘Viale’.

Yes, and look the sun shines over pretty cactus-laden Malta.

Designed by Mintoff himself.

Literal, explicit and disjointed.

What is the Maltese word for vial?

Take all the European languages as an example. The British took words from all over their empire (watching on BBC there are so many Hindi words for example). So it makes English a rich language in vocabulary.

All European languages have a lot of Latin words and are all ‘interconnected’. Also there was a time when the English upper classes spoke only French and looked down on their ‘lingwa tal-Kcina’.

[Daphne – The English upper classes never spoke French, heaven forfend. Those were the Norman invaders. They may have settled in England, but while they were speaking French, they remained resolutely Norman, and by the time their descendants were speaking English, they were English. Also, you are not comparing like with like. You speak here of the organic growth of a language through the assimilation of foreign words over many centuries. This is not the same thing at all as the wholesale plunder over the course of only a few decades of words from just two other languages, to fill an immediate need. If we are going to plunder the contents of the Oxford English dictionary and call it ‘Maltese’, then we should just speak English to begin with, leaving Maltese for everyday situations where uncomplicated language suffices. It’s not as though we don’t have that advantage, so we should use it.]

In fact a lot of French words make quite a part of the language. In German, which I studied, the article Das precedes foreign words (for that language). Foreign verbs are also conjugated differently.