Loan Verbs in Maltese: A Descriptive and Comparative Study.

• Author: Cachia, Pierre

This is a masterly piece of work, in which an all but exhaustive corpus of Maltese loan verbs has been subjected to stringent analysis, and the results set forth in a highly disciplined progressive form, leading to clear and far-reaching conclusions. In seeking parallels and possible influences, the author has ranged over a number of Arabic and Italian dialects, and occasionally ventured into other language groups as well.

No less impressive is the fact that for all the complexity of the material, the book is virtually self-contained, demanding of the reader close attention but hardly any previous expertise. At an early stage, the geographical and politico-cultural background is compactly surveyed - although here it may be argued that the role of religion first in implanting Arabic, then in favoring Romance borrowings, deserves more positive attention. Then as each topic is taken up, the author reviews what his predecessors have said about it, specifies whether he disagrees with them or needs to pursue a different line, then proceeds with his evidence, indicating where (as is necessary in historical reconstruction, since the language was poorly documented until fairly recently) he is relying on surmise. In this connection, it is worth saying that one of the most challenging findings of this study - that the sheer mass and urgency of recent importations from Italian and from English are causing Maltese to drift somewhat from its Semitic moorings, making it more of an agglutinative language (see especially p. 91) - must await the verdict of history since there is an observable correlation between the length of time a word has been in the language and the degree of its integration.

The one irritating feature of this book is that dozens of Maltese words, some quite recondite, (e.g., p. 61), are brought into discussion without an immediate translation, so that the reader who is not thoroughly conversant with the language must either be content with the morphological argument or hunt for the meaning either in a dictionary or in the book's substantial appendices. And although it is indeed morphology that forms the backbone of this study, there are instances in which it is interrelated with semantics, as in the kinship between many quadriliteral verbs of Arabic origin and theme II of the triliterals and their nominal derivatives (see pp. 91ff.); thus the root sh-r-t 'to cut into strips, etc.' yields, in the sense 'rag' (in some dialects also...