Without entering into the polemic about the merits or demerits of the Kunsill tal-Malti, I feel that the three objections raised by most correspondents need clarification. First of all, the case of Netherlandiż is a storm in a teacup which can easily be resolved by Nederlandiż. I know very few Maltese people who can pronounce the th in R.P. when speaking English and, moreover, in this particular case the th is not that of thin [θ] but that of then and brother [ð], which is closer to our d, apart from the fact that the official native name for what we call ‘Holland’ is actually ‘Nederland’.
Skont (< Italian sconto 'discount') and skont (< Italian secondo ‘according to’) have become homographs/homonyms according to Maltese phonetic rules. Secondo lost the unaccented first and last vowels and the resulting final –d is pronounced as -t. The Maltese language shares with German and Occitan (Provençal) the rule of devoicing final voiced consonants (b, d, g become p, t, k) and we therefore write: fond, tond, bjond, rand, bard, mard and bajd, although we pronounce them with a final –t. However, in spelling the final d is kept because when followed by a grammatical vowel (eg feminine –a) the original voiced sound turns up automatically: fonda, tonda, bjonda, randa, bruda, marda, bajda, as in bieb – bieba, ktieb – kitba, Grieg – Griega.
The case of secondo which became skont is a bit different because many people in Malta say skonti (for skond jien), skontok (for skond int), etc. This shows that there has been permanent devoicing: one cannot write ‘skondi’, ‘skondok’ and so on. These forms are not in my personal idiolect and may be regional (which explains why skond has been retained for a long time), but they seem to have become dominant lately. A similar change from d to t came over the word art ‘land’, from Arabic ‘ard’ (in the Cantilena ‘liradi’), because we say and write arti 'my land', artijiet. Following the same principle (i)rkoppa is now written with double p instead of double b.
The question of ta' l- or tal- needs to be considered in the wider context of the whole system of the prepositions that are combined with the definite article. In traditional grammar lil, minn, għal, and bħal always take the article before words beginning not only with consonants but also with vowels: lill-anġli, mill-isbaħ, għall-imsejkna, bħall-ilma, and so do the shortened forms bl- and fl-, bl-imħabba, fl-ajru. The abbreviated forms dal-, dil- and ġol- are written only before words starting with a consonant: dal-ħobż, dil-kelma, ġol-kamra. The article is only kept separate after ma', ta' and sa. This is purely conventional.
Dun Karm (from whose poems all these examples are taken) writes ma' l-art, sa l-art, ta' l-art and mal-qsari, sal-ġenna, tal-bniedem, but he also combines the article with the preposition next to words starting with h and għ, which are mute: mal-hena, mal-għarusa, tal-hena, tal-għaqal. Consequently there is no structural justification for separating the definite article from the preposition before words starting with a vowel as in mal-anġli, tal-art, and so on. On this point, by analogy, the conventional rule can be modified and simplified.
People genuinely interested in the intricacies of the Maltese language that present problems to translators, teachers and journalists will find healthy discussions in l-aċċent, an unofficial publication of the Maltese Language Department of the European Commission, which is also available online (ec.europa.eu/translation/maltese/magazine/mt_magazine_en.htm).
Prof Joseph M Brincat