Yes, the neighbours’ chandelier was rattling.

And did Musumeci ever take my advice and get himself a pair monkstraps? He was complaing about his feet having high arches and the pain caused by Oxfords. Poor fellow.

My heart goes out to him. He could do with a foot massage, perhaps performed by a member of the judiciary. That gives it the extra oomph.

See, this is what gets me. We are taught to believe that somehow language is divorced from history. The ‘old salts’ that served on sailing ships would have done so in the Royal Navy from 1800 onwards, or at any rate they did so when Malta was British. The even older salts did so when the language of the naval officers was Italian or French.

So disabuse yourself of the notion that Maltese contains the full range of nautical terminology from 1500 to 2017. It doesn’t.

You say ‘gifen’. The word comes from the Arabic ‘jafn’ through the Andalusi Arabic ‘jafan’, which refers to a galley, not a galleon.

As for Joseph Muscat the naval historian (not his glorious, immortal and godlike namesake), I do laugh a bit. The ‘xprunara’ was invented in Malta, was it? How about it’s just a fore-and-aft lateen-rigged ship which was invented some time in the seventh century in the Muslim Mediterranean? The dhow is practically identical.

All I was trying to show in that short story – and I’m not too happy with how the debate has gone all over the place except where it should – is how it is impossible to write good, gripping, enjoyable, good-quality stuff in Maltese. That is unless you limit yourself to platitudes to God (Christian, but with an Arabic name) and very simple dialogue of the Me-Tarzan-You-Jane kind.

Now can we PLEASE focus on getting rid of this coagulation of human evil which is the Labour government?

Afterwards, once we do, I will be more than happy to have this debate. Promise.

And this one’s a gem:

http://melitensiawth.com/incoming/Index/Journal%20of%20Maltese%20Studies/Journal%20of%20Maltese%20Studies.%2019-20(1989-1990)/orig09briffa.pdf

More nautical satire about the good ship Malta, please.

This might provide some ideas: http://www.thinksite.eu/pages/tsdart.asp?id=614

Very Saydon influenced: Mirkeb is pure Arabic, coming from an ex-Libya trader.

I guess you’d have to spend time with some old salt who’s also up there with the lingo as you would not learn this at school.

Some words that come to mind would be gifen, xebek. Xebek is a lateen sailed 3-master. And I’m sure there’s a word for galleon, as there would be for caravel or carrack as the knights had those types of vessels and Maltese authors would write about them, probably derived from Italian, Spanish and French. This guy might help:

http://www.bdlbooks.com/history/1790-the-xprunara.html

Don’t laugh.

I get your point though. The words you use in English come naturally to a native English-speaking person. The fact that we cannot come up with the necessary words in Maltese off the cuff is an absolute disgrace and an indictment of the paucity of Maltese public broadcasting programs and Maltese language education.

You obviously missed Musumeci’s reply. Gripping stuff.

Egrant’s ship is a galleon (with a very-small diameter mizzen mast so it can be used as a stripper’s pole, and the galley with fitted rum locker located abaft so it is near the mizzen, and the sailors can enjoy both booze and strippers). There is no proper Maltese word specifically for ‘galleon’.

The bit of twang-of-the-wrist prose above was meant to illustrate the confusion that comes from the vocab not keeping up with the concepts. I mean how do you even say “spar”? Or “rigging”? And is there a word for “sailing master”?

Now that we’ve invented the fantastical Netherlandiz, are we to assume we should write “jochtt”? And what is the Akkademja’s recommended translation of: “Shiver me timbers, look at the tits on that! Like twin spinnakers at full sail, me hearties!”

How do you even write a decent film script in Maltese? It would have to be about boring people doing boring things. Like politicians in parliament, or office workers or something.

Use the German technique – stick the words together and voilà, you have the new word.