# How are languages categorized? (Problem: Maltese language)



## Roel~

It's sometimes not difficult to categorize languages. Dutch and German for example, are quite similar, and it isn't a problem to say that they both belong to the German language group. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic too belong to the Germanic language group and in their features of grammar and lexicology. However, English is much more difficult. It is considered a Germanic language, although it has a lot of influences from Roman languages, because there are still a lot of Germanic features left and because the original Old English was a Germanic language.

A difficult case is the Maltese language. It is quite weird, because this language was first considered as a Roman language, for example by Mussolini, but later it was considered as a Semitic language. The reason mostly is that the vocabulary contains a lot of words from an Italian, if you read a formal text in Maltese, you can quite well read it with knowledge of Romanic languages. If you read phrases used in daily life and informal words, Romanic languages are useless and only knowledge of Arabic or other Semitic languages will help you.

The problem which I adress in this topic is: how can you categorize a language which contains like 50% of two different language groups? Because I think it's quite strange how the language family of Maltese has changed. Is this barely politically decided?


How can a language which shares features of two completely different language groups being categorized?


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## fdb

This is what I would call a non-problem. Maltese is very clearly an offshoot of Maghribi Arabic. The morphology and basic vocabulary is totally Arabic, but it has borrowed heavily from Italian (or rather Sicilian). English is a Germanic language that has borrowed heavily from French. Persian is an Indo-European language that has borrowed heavily from Arabic. Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that has borrowed heavily from Chinese. This is the bread and butter of historical linguistics.


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## Roel~

fdb said:


> This is what I would call a non-problem. Maltese is very clearly an offshoot of Maghribi Arabic. The morphology and basic vocabulary is totally Arabic, but it has borrowed heavily from Italian (or rather Sicilian). English is a Germanic language that has borrowed heavily from French. Persian is an Indo-European language that has borrowed heavily from Arabic. Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that has borrowed heavily from Chinese. This is the bread and butter of historical linguistics.



Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language



> *Classification*
> 
> Maltese is a Semitic language descended from Siculo-Arabic,[9] that in the course of its history has been influenced by Sicilian and Italian, to a lesser extent French, and more recently English. Today, the core vocabulary (including both the most commonly used vocabulary and function words) is Semitic, with large numbers of loan words.[3]  Because of the Sicilian influence on Siculo-Arabic, Maltese has many  language contact features and is most commonly described as a language  with a large number of loanwords.[10]
> The Maltese language has historically been classified in various ways, with some claiming that the ancient Punic language was the base of the language, instead of Siculo-Arabic,[7][11][12] while others believed the language to be Berber,[7] and under Fascist Italy, it was considered a dialect of Italian.[13]





Considering your answer, if a language is switched from one language group to another it is barely politics which does this, like under Facist Italy? Because you seem to say that that the features of a language stay the same, no matter how many borrowings it has. Actually I agree with you, because I think the same. I just wonder if a language has like 70% or 80% borrowings, can it still be considered as belonging to a certain group, or will it change to the language group of the borrowings? Because 70% or 80% would be a huge amount. I don't know if this is factual though and if any language exists where this is the case.

I 'm not a linguist, so that's the reason why I ask this kind of questions, but I learn a lot from this forum.


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## Ihsiin

What's in a name? as the great poet said. A rose by any other name would smell as strong.

We can at least be consistent. I don't think that the Italian influence on Maltese is greater than the French influence on English. If English is uncontroversially Germanic, then Maltese should be uncontroversially Arabic.
The Maltese Bible, for example, is pretty much intelligible to an Arabic speaker: http://ia600508.us.archive.org/0/items/rosettaproject_mlt_gen-1/rosettaproject_mlt_gen-1.pdf

We should also note that Mussolini was not a philologist.


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## CitizenEmpty

I believe there might be some Berber loanwords in Maltese.


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## Gavril

Roel~ said:


> Considering your answer, if a language is switched from one language  group to another it is barely politics which does this, like under  Facist Italy? Because you seem to say that that the features of a  language stay the same, no matter how many borrowings it has. Actually I  agree with you, because I think the same. I just wonder if a language  has like 70% or 80% borrowings, can it still be considered as belonging  to a certain group, or will it change to the language group of the  borrowings? Because 70% or 80% would be a huge amount. I don't know if  this is factual though and if any language exists where this is the  case.



According to some linguists, the important question  is how the language has been transmitted from person to person over  time: if there is an unbroken line of communication within a community  across time, then the language of this community remains the same (in  terms of its ancestry), regardless of how much foreign vocabulary has  been adopted over time, or how many grammatical changes take place.

By  this definition, Maltese would be a descendant of Arabic (as opposed to  Italian) as long as there hasn't been any "breach" in the line of  communication going back to the first Arabic speakers in Malta.

I'm  not sure that I agree with this view of language change myself (for example, I  don't fully understand how it defines a "line of communication"), but  it is one possible answer to your question.


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## entangledbank

Languages with heavy borrowing are common: English, Maltese, Japanese, and others mentioned above. The core vocabulary, the everyday concepts, are still largely from the genetic parent. You can write English without any borrowings at all (though you have to cheat sometimes, the way you do when you write lipograms). And to me, Maltese is Arabic pure and simple, especially as I've only studied it at a basic level so I only know basic grammar and vocabulary, not the borrowings that fill the dictionary. Truly mixed languages, where linguists would call them mixed or can't decide how to classify them because of apparent mixing, are extremely rare: there are two or three that I've encountered in the literature, such as Michif and Mbugu, and a new one that was recently reported in Australia.


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## M Mira

When two languages intermix heavily, I think we usually categorize their descendants by their grammar. So whose grammar, its language group.


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## Nino83

Hi. 
I'm an Italian and Sicilian native speaker and I can confirm what Fdb and Gavril said. 

For example: http://mt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingwa_Maltija 



> *Il-Malti* huwa lsien li jikkonsisti minn *elementi lingwistiċi mħalltin* li *jirrappreżentaw* *il-perjodi storiċi differenti* li għadda minnhom il-pajjiż fil-*passat, passat iddominat* minn ħakmiet barranin matul is-*sekli*.



In this sentence I understand only these words. I don't know Arabic or other Semitic languages. 
Probably it is said that "gli elementi linguistici maltesi rappresentano periodi storici differenti"[...]"che rappresentano/riflettono" (I guess) "le dominazioni passate". 

But, at the same time there are sentences which are completely unintelligible. 



> Matul bosta żminijiet il-*Maltin* ħaddnu l-ilsien Taljan bħala l-ilsien *uffiċjali* tal-*pajjiż*.



Some sentences are completely intelligible. 

awtur ta' drammi, rumanzi u novelli (Maltese) = auturi (d)i drammi, rumanzi e nuvelli (Sicilian) = autore di drammi, romanzi e novelle (Italian)


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## Delvo

It sounds like the source of confusion is one claim made by one political figure and his political associates, including no linguists, for unknown reasons not related to actual linguistics.

Whatever the explanation is for that odd behavior in that specific case, ignoring just that one thing makes the rest pretty clear. I could claim that Polish is a dialect of Hopi. You'd be pretty confused if you took me seriously. Don't take me seriously, and everything else that's left makes more sense.


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## Nino83

> *Il-Malti* huwa lsien li *jikkonsisti* minn *elementi lingwistiċi mħalltin* li *jirrappreżentaw **il-perjodi storiċi differenti* li għadda minnhom *il-pajjiż* fil-*passat, passat iddominat *minn ħakmiet barranin matul is-*sekli. *



I forgot these two words ("consiste" and "paese").


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## bearded

I understand some Arabic, although in Maltese the words are spelt and pronounced differently from Standard Arabic (I was once told that Maltese has much in common with the dialect of Tunisia nowadays), and I can translate a few words:
Il Malti huwa lsien li jikkonsisti min ... (Standard Arabic ''Al Maltii, huwa lisaan alladhi <consists> min...) = Maltese, it is a language that consists of...
/ Plus some isolated words / : li ghadda minnhom (Ar: alladhi qad min hum) = which from them...
fil = in the, minn hakmiet =(from a government?) , matul = during...  
The word 'jikkonsisti' is interesting because, although of Sicilian origin, it is conjugated according to the rules of Arabic grammar (prefix ji- (Ar. ia-) indicates the 3rd person present indicative.


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## Hulalessar

Nino83 said:


> But, at the same time there are sentences which are completely unintelligible.
> 
> ***
> Some sentences are completely intelligible.



I do not think that the degree of intelligibility is a sound guide to the degree of relatedness. A native English speaker who knows no other language will find any natural text of any length in another Germanic language almost wholly, if not completely, unintelligible. The same text in a Romance language is likely to have several words he recognises.

What Gavril says hits the nail on the head. It is a bit like your body and the clothes you wear; you can change your appearance by changing your clothes but your body stays the same. Classifying languages according to ancestry (the tree model) does not though tell you everything. The tree model needs to be complemented by the wave model which reflects how languages change and interact.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> I do not think that the degree of intelligibility is a sound guide to the degree of relatedness.



In fact, I said that I agree with Fdb and Gavril. Maltese is not a Romance language.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> What Gavril says hits the nail on the head. It is a bit like your body  and the clothes you wear; you can change your appearance by changing  your clothes but your body stays the same.



A problem with the analogy to human bodies is that a person's body  remains in (mostly) the same form throughout life, whereas according to  the view I mentioned earlier, the particular form of a language (i.e.,  specific words and grammar features) is not essential to its genetic  identity.

For example, every time a piece of software is updated,  new lines of code are added to it, and there may come a point where all  the original code has been replaced. But, even when this happens, it is  still considered the "same" program, because

1) it still serves the same basic purpose (e.g., Windows has always been an operating system)
and
2) new versions are created with awareness of previous versions, so there is a certain historical continuity

In  the case of human languages, the equivalent of #1 would be a language  serving the purpose of communication for a group of people, and #2 would be the  continuous transmission of the language from generation to generation within this group.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> A problem with the analogy to human bodies is..._etc_



I did say "_a bit_ like your body and the clothes you wear".


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> I did say "_a bit_ like your body and the clothes you wear".



True, I just thought it was important to point out some differences between the two kinds of continuity (no offense intended).


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> True, I just thought it was important to point out some differences between the two kinds of continuity (no offense intended).



None taken, I assure you.


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