The holy grail of studies on the Maltese language
Maltese and Other Languages
by Joseph M. Brincat, 2021
Until relatively recently, the study of language in Malta – and not only in Malta – has been hampered by a myriad of pitfalls, deceptions and pitfalls – mostly worked out by ignorant amateurs, who claim irrepressible incompetence, self-serving fanatical politicians. agendas and genuine patriots who don’t mind being roughly wrong.
Until recently, the precise science of linguistics also served as the banquet table where the uninformed and the unassuming daredevil would bend themselves.
This began to change after the Second World War, with the pioneering studies of Guzè Aquilina, Pietru Pawl Saydon, Arnold Cassola, Dionysius Agius, Manwel Mifsud, Oliver Friggieri and other colleagues who worked to lay the foundations of the study of Maltese. sodi. By Joseph Brincat, who in the 2000s published his first versions of the book under review. Finally, with it, the Maltese language has its own Bible.
It would be too discouraging to review the ‘pioneers’ of so-called Maltese language studies – all tainted by utterly irrational political prejudice. Start with Annibale Preca, on the one hand, and Antonio Cini on the other; the Preca cohort is more around the place with their obsession that the Maltese were the proud firstborn of the Phoenicians-Carthaginians.
In 1904, the Preca language “expert” was able to claim that Italian surnames such as Anastasi, Aquilina, Diacono and La Rosa were in fact the names of the Punic family. Eye Istas, Whole Eye, The Beard u The Bride.
The opposing Cini faction may not have been an advanced science either, but at least it wasn’t as bad at the top of its voice as their ‘Semitic’ opponents.
Brincat does not list in his exhaustive bibliography the input of my father, his 1938 booklet Mito della Razza, published under the pen name Promachos at a time when it was dangerous to even be considered from the bottom of the British colonialism, which promoted any maniac. Phoenician connection.
You know, the Phoenicians colonized Malta and also visited Cornwall – so the British and the Maltese are the same happy single family, ‘stoopid’. I’m not kidding, I read this irrefutable argument picked up in the press of the 1930s, even reflected in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
We approach this book review with extreme apprehension. I am nothing but an expert in language studies, which I allow myself to respect only remotely.
Brincat sifts through all the evidence in his attempts to establish which language the inhabitants of the Maltese islands spoke in megalithic, Punic, Roman and Byzantine times. He examines this data under an electron microscope in a long, dense 33-page chapter, a tour de force of erudition and sleuthing.
None of the vague indications are sufficiently eloquent or decisive, as the survivors are scarce and contaminated. The final judgment is disheartening but sincere – we just don’t know. And, I guarantee, not because of a lack of proof on the part of Brincat.
I will remove from the beginning any preconceived notion that this is a daunting book. On the contrary, I found it a compelling, non-sour narrative that is convincingly readable, well-documented of what the Maltese language is today and, most importantly, how it got there – from the nebulous outlines of what the inhabitants may have spoken. of Malta in pre-Arabic. days, for what the Maltese speak today – Maltese in its various social, cultural and regional variants: Maltese, English, Maltese-English, Italian, Maltese-Italian.
Brincat shares the scene in his eager preface, calling his maternal and paternal progenitors along with his precious relatives as witnesses, and observes with the most gentle smile how each of them enters his or her Maltese differently, but in the same way. ‘, niche.
The book is full of small or big discoveries. The most innovative, in my opinion, is that today’s Maltese undoubtedly originated in North African Arabic, but the inhabitants of Malta did not get their tongues directly from the Maghreb Arabs, but from the Sicilians. Sicily was, until
Conquered Norman, a powerful colony under Arab rule. Wherever Maltese differs from ‘classical’ Arabic, it varies as did Sicilian Arabic, not as modern Maghreb Arabic did.
This, together with other evidence – literary and archaeological – that during the extended periods of Arab rule, the Maltese islands were completely uninhabited or barely inhabited, confirms the fact that after the Norman Christianization of Sicily, Malta welcomed a migration of the mass of Arabized. Sicilians (not Arabs), who brought with them their basically Arabic language, but its Sicilian variant.
Finally, with Brincat, the Maltese language has its own Bible
Strong evidence, I would say irrefutable, of this still exists in the language to this day, in the silence embedded in the morphology and vocabulary of Maltese. Brincat gives very brief hints for DNA sources, which seem to suggest that the genetic profile of the present Maltese population is extravagant Sicilian, and minimally Arab. I don’t want to slice any hornets ’nests, let alone racist-type nasty ones.
The original Siculo-Arabic that the new settlers brought with them from Sicily has not survived forever pure. Shameful contamination with the Roman languages began quite early, with many contributing factors to today’s extraordinary mix – a language whose grammar remains firmly Semitic but whose vocabulary is mostly non-Arabic.
There are many reasons for this: the Romansh Christians, who speak Romanian, are the top dogs since the Normans took power, they also started living in Malta, the language of administration has become Sicilian Latin and the Correspondence with royal Sicilian bureaucrats was to take place in the Sicilian Cancer, Maltese trade with Italy predominated, and the flourishing Christian religion relied exclusively on Latin and Roman idioms.
In Malta, the Arab-Maltese found themselves besieged on all sides by Roman forces. It gave up part of its dictionary but stuck to its Semitic organic structure. Brincat discovered fingerprints of this evolutionary process spread across the entire corpus of words used, or used before, in Malta.
The Order of St. John, which has ruled the islands for more than a quarter of a millennium, has generally shown indifference to the language of its subjects. Although the three numerically major languages into which the knights were subdivided all speak French, for official uses the knights resorted to Latin and later to Italian. With eight different languages, along with many foreign traders, visitors and slaves from Turkey, Russia and North Africa, tiny Malta had turned into a veritable babel of discordant languages.
A few knights, and others, mostly Grand Tour scholars, during the reign of the Order showed enough curiosity to show interest in the strange ‘Moorish’ speech heard by the natives and tried to penetrate some of its arcane secrets. . How could it have originated? Was it worth studying?
The first ‘scholars’, weak and weak, but still the pioneers of Maltese studies, happened to be all foreigners. Domestic linguists began to show some interest in their language only in the 18th century, but eventually took over, and in retaliation, made up for their previous game.
Prof Brincat, arguably commendable, left out of his bibliography the one, my timid and eminently expendable venture into Maltese linguistics, my 2007 document on the legacy of the Order of Maltese language. So, with what wrong move do I now dare to critically evaluate this book which must surely count as the Holy Grail of today’s Maltese linguistics?
For almost a hundred years during the British period, the so-called “language question” caused the island. London began to believe that the security and welfare of the Empire required a fuller anglicization of Malta. For centuries the current written language on the island has been Italian.
The administration, the Church, the literati and the intelligence, the courts, the whole university took it for granted, effortlessly and without a trace of official imposition, that the inhabitants spoke Maltese but wrote Italian.
To the British colonialists and their home-made minions, this cultural Italianness emerged, as the suppression of the Italian by the dictates of the government angered the non-colonialists. Why should our owners make English by legislation as the current and dominant language?
The population is, in fact, divided: those who have suffered foreign interference in their millennial cultural heritage, and those who do everything they believe will be to the satisfaction of our colonial owners.
Full volumes have been written on this most central and disruptive pit in Maltese politics until the Second World War. Brincat has a new look at it – how Anglo-Italian political tensions in Malta and the formation of political parties have helped push the Maltese language to the forefront.
And how this, in turn, aroused increasing scientific curiosity in, and the study of, Maltese linguistics – all this took place during the British period.
So, what is the present and future of our proud language? The influx of non-Maltese words, although statistically not as massive as it is perceived, has helped keep the Maltese language vital and vibrant. Arrikkit? Or bastardized? It doesn’t really matter, unless the language is on the endangered species list.
Freelance journalism costs money. Times of Malta Support for price of coffee.
Support us