Blatant chauvinism by the state broadcaster: woman as man’s chattel
Published:
October 6, 2014 at 8:27pm
Will the Minister for Civil Liberties and Equality be so kind as to issue guidelines on terminology to the state broadcaster?
Ppowkjalu lit-tfajla
Do I really need to explain how this is different to ppowkja t-tfajla tieghu?
Unfortunately, nothing can be done about the ‘tfajla tieghu’, because Maltese is so primitive that it identifies spouses and boy/girlfriends as ‘his/her man/woman/girl/youth’.
And that’s quite apart from the way TVM is now massacring two languages with words like PPOWKJA.
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Probabbli “ppowkjawhielu” għax kien “jiffansjaha”. This is crazy. The Għaqda tal-Malti should to be up in arms.
No it’s not. They are the ones who are allowing English words to be phonetically changed into Maltese so that Maltese becomes more internationally user-friendly. I do believe we will regret this decision.
But in English you also say “his girlfriend” or “her husband” so it’s not because Maltese is primitive.
[Daphne – It’s not the possessive form that’s the problem, Claude, but the noun. There’s the WORLD of difference between ‘his woman’ and ‘his wife’. And equally, the world of difference between ‘her man’ and ‘her husband’. The weird thing is that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ needn’t involve marriage, but for some primitive reason it has come to do so. The Arabic for spouse is ZEWG, and if you think about it, so too in Maltese (“zewgi”) except that we now have ‘isem ir-ragel’ and ‘isem il-mara’ on official forms rather than ‘isem zewgek’.]
At least Maltese is symmetrical with mara/ragel. Other languages like Spanish use woman (mujer) to mean wife and husband (marido) to for the man.
No so. Let me just zip up my anorak….
…done.
marido (Spanish) < maritus (Latin) < mas (Latin) = male
Spanish for ‘man’ is hombre.
I’ve always hated the terms “ir-ragel / il-mara tieghi”. The proper Maltese is zewgi/marti and we should have always stuck to those, as in other languages.
[Daphne – Actually, zewgi means spouse and is used for both husband and wife. Marti is a contraction of ‘il-mara tieghi’.]
http://inewsmalta.com/dart/20141006-leo-brincat-jis-aq-fuq-afas-all-ener-ija-ust-flessibli
Ara qafas…ghafas
Anzi għal ġieħna l-PBS kellhom idaħħlu lil xi ħadd jagħmel il-qari tal-provi tal-Malti qabel ma joħroġ fuq l-iskrin. U kull min idaħħal proposta għal programm ġdid, kellu jgħid min kien il-persuna kwalifikata li qed tiċċekkja l-Malti tal-iskripts.
Jidher li spiċċa kollox u kulħadd qed jagħmel li jrid.
Who poked who?
Did that balding Brian Epstein looking guy poke some girl?
I would think that he would be more into guys.
Kemm hu taci.
Ppowkja xiex? It’s hardly pronounceable. The article later uses ‘poke’ rather than ‘powk’.
How about saying: “Ragel baghat ‘poke’ fuq Facebook lit-tfajla ta’ siehbu u spicca maqtul.”
It’s ironic. My English teacher used to encourage us to buy and read The Sunday Times (the UK version) to help us get comfortable with the current use of the language.
Although coming to think of it, none of my Maltese teachers ever encouraged us to read a Maltese paper or any Maltese author, except maybe Trevor Zahra.
We should be looking at schools where they make kids write things like ‘howmwerk’ I categorically refuse to let my son write anything of the sort, having said that I believe it is the Ghaqda tal-Malti that introduced these silly translations
Maltese has been reduced to a Facebook language of sorts.
The Maltese language needs emergency treatment not dissimilar to how Ebola is being handled.
How else to raise the levels of thinking?
The precision of our individual vocabulary is what gives precision to individual thinking.
If a word or concept doesn’t exist in the mind, association building doesn’t happen and thinking remains poor.
There is an over-reliance on the thinking of others, and a dire lack of perception tools.
Incorrect perceptions give incorrect results, no matter how correct the logic used to process those perceptions.
When exploration stops through sheer laziness or because it is no longer beneficial to one’s argument to consider other input, this leads to an arrest of the thinking process.
Input comes in over time. What is the quality of our input?
It took years before people started enquiring as to what the quality of burger ingredients is. How many enquired as to the provenance of the meat and the amount of fat content before it became fashionable to do so?
A lazy disposition leads to progressive debilitation of the thinking potential: Maltese isn’t going to get its radically needed overhaul under this administration.
A fresh administration should prioritise the language handicap issue.
Language gets stuck in a bog unless honed and pruned on a daily basis.
The English language gets its honing and pruning.
On a balance, the Maltese population gains far more benefits from an emphasis on its English language heritage than it currently does from its frustrated Maltese language heritage.
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Joseph Muscat is not blind to this: he seeks his opinions from British consultants and writers. He seeks input from those forming it. Whether the opinion formulation is flawed or not would be a subjective analysis. If the writers have a decidedly Socialist bent – the one Socialist still immature and the other “apolitical” Socialist deceptive and functioning without positive value filters to perception, amid others – analysis has additional elements with which to assess the output.
So many other elements should enter the perception scan. But do they?
Basic unstructured thinking is designed to be lazy.
When the thinking of a nation is in a rut, that is what has happened.
Mrs Caruana Galizia,
You may want to read this, given our Government’s propensity for saying Cannabis is a walk in the park and some fun for kids: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11145094/Cannabis-as-addictive-as-heroin-major-new-study-finds.html
What does the word mean, may I ask?