A deliberately misleading headline on the General Workers Union’s news site
You look at this headline and you think that the girl herself has been taken, that she was travelling by bus alone and abducted by strangers.
Then you read the story and you find out that she was on that bus with her mother, that they switched seats and when the girl realised that she had left her bag behind on the other seat and went back to retrieve it, it was gone.
Exactly how is this a news story?
It isn’t. That’s why they used that headline. And iNews should NEVER have used a photograph of the child, not even with her mother’s consent. If parents are irresponsible and unthinking, newspapers should not take advantage of that but should instead explain to the parents why it’s a bad idea.
Incidentally, that headline really points up how ill-served we are by the restricted vocabulary of Maltese. ‘Misruqa’ means stolen, not robbed. But to avoid the linguistic contortions of having to say ‘a handbag was stolen from a girl’ (because there is no word for ‘robbed’), we have ended up taking the shortcut of saying that the girl herself was stolen and expecting people to understand whether we mean ‘stolen’ or actually ‘robbed’ from the context.
Expect more of these non-stories – a ‘bloody foreigner’ damaging his landlord’s cheap door and being taken to court over Eur450, 3g of cannabis in a sock at the detention centre, and now this. It’s the silly season. There’s plenty of real news, but nobody has the time and energy to rout it out.
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http://www.inewsmalta.com/dart/20140628-tifla-ta-tmien-snin-misruqa-fuq-tal-linja
They are acting so stupidly, and what can be worrying is the fact that they might not be feeling stupid at all.
That’s how the pro-Labour GWU newspapers behaved during the golden 16-year reign of Labour between 1971-87 under Mintoff and KMB.
It is probably slow news day.
Daphne, if inews intended that the girl herself was abducted, the world mahtufa would have been used, in this case the maltese is correct. Misruqa refers also to robbed.
[Daphne – You’re wrong. Mahtufa means ‘snatched’, and refers to that specific action, as with handbags. A child who goes willingly is not ‘mahtufa’. She would have been ‘mahtufa’ if she had been dragged away kicking and screaming, which is clearly not possible on a public bus. As for ‘misruqa’ meaning both ‘stolen’ and ‘robbed’, that’s just my point. Imagine saying, in English, ‘I’ve been stolen.’ And in any case, you are supposed to change the form in which you use the verb ‘seraq’, to signify that you have been robbed, rather than stolen. It’s the same with the distinction between ‘to learn’ and ‘to teach’: Maltese uses the same verb, but then ‘tghallimt’ means ‘I learned’ and ‘ghallimt’ means ‘I taught’.]
Isn’t “mahtuf” being used by our language Taliban as the dog Maltese version of “hijacked”?
I think the verb you’re referring to Daphne is ‘nsteraq’, the 7th form of the stem ‘seraq’. It means “he was robbed”, as opposed to “ġie misruq”, which literally means “he was stolen”.
I saw that article on my Facebook wall earlier, and I too was somewhat baffled by the poor choice of words.
“ġie misruq” is bad Maltese. The calque “ġie” is for Romance words, e.g. “ġie żviluppat/aġġornat/stmat”, etc. “ġie misruq” is “insteraq”. I do not blame you; on TV you get “dan il-programm qed jiġi miġjub lilkom” ad nauseam. It should be “dan il-programm qed jinġieb lilkom”.
That’s what comes of being diglossial. The writer was trying to use the sort of atemporal present tense. In English, especially in newspapers, we do it all the time:
“Girl robbed”
“Train crashes, many injured”
How would you write the present tense of the 7th form of this Arabic verb? That’s right, it would be:
“Tifla tinsteraq.”
And we’re almost back to where we were.
My friends, it’s time we stopped using Maltese to communicate concepts that it cannot handle. If that means confining it to poetry on fishing baskets and vulgar chants, then so be it.
P.S. The writer could have avoided the confusion by getting his Maltese brain to focus on the essence of the story, viz. that a handbag was stolen. The owner of the handbag is a minor detail.
Hendbeg ta’ tifla misruq.
Had the incident occurred some months back, that headline would undoubtedly have read “Tifla misruqa fuq l-ARRIVA”.
And would have blamed Austin Gatt for the laxity in security.
Tifla ta’ tmien snin insterqilha l-baskett fuq tal-linja, would have made things clearer.
This story, on the other hand, should be huge:
http://www.newsbook.com.mt/artikli/2014/6/29/tliet-hallelin-li-nqabdu-jisirqu-jergghu-jidhru-fl-istess-hanut.19539
Way to go, Pietru Pawl, jaqaw tghalaq in-negozju fil-festa?
” ċempel in-numru tal-emerġenza 112, iżda ma wieġbu ħadd.”
Most Maltese speaking persons would not understand the headline to mean an abduction or kidnap. One does not usually refer to stealing a person but stealing an object from from or belonging to a person.
[Daphne – I am a Maltese-speaking person, David. The difference between me and your average iNews reader is that I am a fairly well-educated Maltese-speaking person, whereas they are not. Do not make the absurd but very common error of confusing an inability to speak any language other than Maltese with superior knowledge of Maltese. It is generally the other way round, because lack of knowledge of any other language presupposes lack of education, and lack of education presupposes difficulties with vocabulary, grammar, syntax and eloquence.]
David, I am a Maltese speaker born and bred, and I understood it to mean kidnap. Any native Maltese speaker would.
Same here.
Same here.
I think you (Daphne) are right. “misruqa” could mean “abducted” or “robbed/stolen”. Like “to learn/teach” or “house/home” for Maltese “dar”. But then you get “raġel/bniedem” for “man”.
Each language perfectly suffices for its speakers. Eskimese is not as widespread as English but its vocabulary for ice, snow, hale, etc, by far outstrips that for English because it is their bread and butter!
Back to “misruqa”, I tried to find something comparable in English. What is “They are sailing ships?” or “They are cooking apples?”
[Daphne – English does not allow for such errors. It is possibly the most precise language in existence. ‘They are sailing ships’ means that the people of whom you speak are on ships and are sailing them. ‘They are sailing-ships’ means that the ships of which we speak have sails and are propelled by the wind. Similarly, ‘they are cooking apples’ means that the people of whom we speak are doing exactly that: cooking apples. But ‘they are cooking-apples’ means that the apples under discussion are of the variety meant for cooking. The hyphen creates the noun. Without the hyphen, it is a verb and a noun.]
Or “I had almost broken your glasses for you” or better still “Please undress for me” (do not take me wrong – it’s the nurse to the patient!)
[Daphne – That’s just bad English, so a useless comparison.]
No, respectfully, the hyphen is not required. And not only because they come from Chomsky’s. They are cases of phrase-structure ambiguity. Like “flying objects” and “misruqa” and what not.
[Daphne – The ‘respectfully’ is unnecessary. You are quite wrong. The rule in British English is clear and unquivocal: when the meaning would otherwise be ambiguous, use a hyphen. Noam Chomsky’s works are written in American English. I don’t know the rules for that particular branch of the language, or even if there are any. I prefer British English because it is the real thing. It is also the form we are meant to use in Europe generally and in Malta in particular, where it is one of our official languages. It is virtually impossible to have any ambiguity with ‘flying objects’, aside from the fact that it is an established noun in and of itself, thanks to UFOs. Purely as a note, ‘they’ cannot “come from Chomsky’s”, unless Chomsky is a shopkeeper, a restaurant or similar.]
As to “glasses” and “for you/me”, the ambiguity is in the meaning of “glasses” and the apologetic/polite idiomatic turn for “instead of you/me”. As to their bad English – Queen’s, slang or otherwise, I heard them from the horses’ mouth – English English native speakers.
[Daphne – With respect (which is the correct term, and not ‘respectfully’), you don’t sound to me like somebody who is equipped to tell the difference. This is one subject I know a fair bit about, so please don’t be so annoyingly presumptuous. I would never DREAM of arguing about the finer points of the language with somebody who is super-fluent in Maltese, even though I am a native speaker myself. I would assume that they know what they are talking about, so instead of bitching and bickering, perhaps I should listen. That’s actually how I pick up a lot that I never knew before. There’s isn’t anything interesting to read in Maltese, so the only way to develop what I know is by listening to articulate people and figuring it out.]
Or better still: Tifla ta’ tmien snin, insterqilha l-hendbekk fuq tal-linja.
39 characters including spaces: Jinsteraq handbag fuq karozza tal-linja
42 characters: Tifla ta’ tmien snin misruqa fuq tal-linja
When I first read the headline I too understood it as kidnap rather than robbery. I refrained from commenting, not being too sure of my own Maltese.