De English it is good, but de Itelien it is fentestic

Joseph Muscat on his party’s television station a few minutes ago, addressing the Italian prime minister: “La nostro invito…”

That’s exactly why I would never be so presumptuous as to do any public speaking in Italian: I make those kinds of mistakes.

Well, not as bad as la nostro invito, because even I know that the only Italian nouns which end in ‘o’ and take the definite article ‘la’ are feminine nouns despite the ‘o’ ending, because they are essentially Greek – like la radio.

And then of course there’s the opposite: the Italian nouns which end in ‘a’ but take the masculine definite article ‘il’ because, again, they are essentially Greek – like il problema.

This is especially confusing to Maltese people because Maltese, being the exceptional ‘home-made’ language (a home, that is, where there was little to no education of any kind), treats ‘problema’ – a word taken straight from Italian – as feminine precisely because of that ‘a’: problema kbira. Try being a stickler for correctness, and saying ‘problema kbir’, and you’ll be shot at dawn by those who really do think they know better.