My point here is that the Akkademja has decided that calques should be formed overnight from English words, that these calques should reflect the accent of the Maltese equivalent of Tommy Robinson, and that the Maltese equivalent of Jeremy Paxman should be expected to adopt the pronunciation (and the spelling that reflects it) of the Maltese equivalent of Tommy Robinson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyO9s07Jgs

You think it’s all right for ‘blackboard’ to be spelled in Maltese (that’s what I gathered – did I misread you?), but it can’t be spelled in Maltese because Maltese does not have those sounds.

It can only be spelled ‘in Maltese’ if it reflects Maltese pronunciation. If you expect people to pronounce it the English way, then it has to be spelled the English way too.

You’re the one that’s digging.

Children do not have difficulty learning that ‘futbol’ is Maltese and ‘football’ is English.

They have difficulty understanding why they are expected to spell the English word ‘football’ as ‘futbol’ – because they KNOW it is an English word and not a Maltese one.

If they were isolated completely from English, this would not be a problem – it apparently is not a problem for Poles, for example.

But Maltese children are not isolated from English. On the contrary, they are exposed to English writing nowadays (via the internet) far more than they are exposed to Maltese.

The mistake you are making here is in approaching both ‘futbol’ and ‘football’ as equal. They are not. The original (read real) word is the latter. Children know that, let alone adults.

Suffice it to say that Tony Blair, Ed Miliband and David Cameron all speak the same way. There’s a reason for that.

There’s also a reason why you can’t create a Maltese calque for English words: the vowel sounds in the two languages are completely different. There is nothing like the ‘a’ in ‘blackboard’ in Maltese. And yet children have to learn that English ‘a’ sound because they have to learn English.

The solution here is not to force English words into Maltese vowel sounds, but to teach their proper English pronunciation and make sure this pronunciation is used in both English and Maltese. THAT is how languages evolve properly over time.

The problem of incorporating English words into Maltese cannot be compared to the incorporation of ‘foreign’ words into other languages for the simple and fundamental reason that English is not a foreign language to Maltese people, who are taught both, constantly exposed to both, expected to speak both, and for whom both are the country’s official languages.

Bollocks. English loan words do not have their spelling changed by decree. That’s what our Akkademja does.