warda

I would like to correct one of my previous statements: it is not entirely the case that I only like Columbo; I also like other things, for example Maltese and just about everything Umberto Eco has ever written. And so when I found out that a Maltese translation of The Name of the Rose had been published, all I could say was tace et cape pecuniam meam. A few weeks back I had the opportunity to escape the Central European cold and go to Malta. Naturally, one of my priorities was to obtain a copy of Isem il-Warda. And now that I hold it my hands (after having catalogued it and provided it with a protective cover), I am ... not really confident in the quality of the translation.

The first signs are right there on the cover, more specifically the back of it which contains a brief bio of the author. It informs us that 

Umberto Eco (1932-2016) twieled ġewwa Alessandria fil-Piemonte.

Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was born in Alessandria in Piedmont. 

I am of course not a native speaker of Maltese, but over the last sev... twel... ohmygodreally twenty-two years of my engagement with the language, I have developed a good feeling for it, and this phrase strikes me as strange. More specifically, it is the use of the preposition that is strange. As Stolz et al. (2017: 457) point out, Maltese exhibits toponymic zero marking, which is just a fancy way of saying that if you want to say something happened at a named place, you typically do not use a preposition. For example:

Dun Joe Caruana twieled il-Mellieħa nhar it-2 ta' Awissu, 1960.

Dun Joe Caruana was born in Mellieħa at noon on the 2nd of August, 1960. 

That this sentence also contains an adverbial of time without a preposition is just a happy coincidence I will look into later. For now, note that this being a human language, there is at least some variation, and so this is also perfectly good Maltese:

Patri Serafin twieled fix-Xewkija fit-23 ta' Awwissu tas-sena 1932.

Father Serafin was born in Xewkija on the 23rd of August of the year 1932.

There is a third option available, the preposition ġo also meaning 'in'. And it is a well-established option, as evident from the fact that it is feature in No. 69 from Ilg and Stumme's Maltesische Volkslieder (Leipzig 1909), p. 27. I am reproducing the verse in question in modern standard orthography.

ara x'ġara ġo Ħal-Qormi

look what happened in Ħal-Qormi 

Interestingly, ġo does not seem to be used with the verb twieled (or its feminine form twieldet). When I ran a corpus search on the two verb forms and extracted 300 random examples, only three options cropped up:

Preposition	Count
ø	37
f'	42
ġewwa	3

This low frequency of ġewwa + NOUN_PROP supports my feeling and to check, I went to the local digital watercooler and asked native speakers. The vast majority of them shared my suspicion of it, some describing it as an Ingliżata, i.e. a calque from English (with a hint of negative sentiment conveyed by the suffix -ata). Many had never seen it and cried apage satanas itlaq ja xitan; some have pointed out that this is a feature of (assumingly bad) journalistic style - after all, the preposition actually means 'inside (of)' a 3-dimensional enclosed object. Corpus data partially bear these observations out: even if we just consider the two prepositions and the two most frequent toponyms - which, unsurprisingly, turn out to be the Maltese names for Malta and Gozo - ġewwa is by far the minority option:

f'Malta	ġewwa Malta
105.214	700
f'Għawdex	ġewwa Għawdex
43.065	1.273

So far so good. The text type (genre) analysis, however, identifies a different culprit for this Ingliżata. As a shock to no one, it's the politicians who are responsible for this crime against the Maltese language.

Rank	Text type	Absolute frequency	%
1	parliament debates	548	78.06%
2	newspaper	147	20.94%
3	non-fiction	6	0.85%
4	fiction	1	0.14%

Excellent, that all makes sense, so it's bad Maltese spread by politicians. And as with all such things, the origin of this abomination is in the influence of English where the function of the English 'in' was calqued onto the Maltese ġewwa. Done, dusted, all explained. Except...

You see, the corpus I have been using so far is one designed to cover the language of the first two decades of the 21st century (plus or minus). As such, it does not contain older works of literature, such as those written by Ġużè Muscat Azzopardi and Anton Manwel Caruana, where especially the latter is noted for his purism (i.e. exclusion of words of non-Arabic origin). I do have a corpus that includes these works and a few clicks and key presses later, I can confirm that ġewwa is used with toponyms in works from the late 19th century as well. Like this one from Muscat Azzopardi's 1881 Viku Mason:

Wara jumejn, kien magħluq ġewwa l-Imdina...

After two days, he was locked in Mdina...

Or this one from his 1909 Nazju Ellul (where the term il-Belt 'the city' refers to the location that only laws and tourist guides call 'Valletta').

Imma ġewwa l-Belt ġriet ix-xniegħa bejn in-nies tagħna...

But in Valletta a rumour spread among our people...

Recall that the original meaning of ġewwa is 'inside (of)', i.e. within a 3-dimensional enclosed object; in fact, ġewwa also doubles as an adverb with that very meaning. The prototypical noun to be used with ġewwa is 'house', 'building' or 'school'. And its use makes perfect sense in both examples above when you consider the physical nature of the locations: Mdina is a walled city located on a hill, while Valletta is on a peninsula with a single point of entry. Both can thus be viewed as 3-dimensional enclosed objects.

The same is not the case for the following example from Caruana's 1889 Ineż Farruġ. Here ġewwa is used with a name of a locality that is not surrounded by walls or the sea:

... kien ġej ma' missieru minn ġewwa r-Rabat...

... he was coming with his father from inside of Rabat...

And of course, in this case, we are not dealing with location, but rather movement from. The use of ġewwa is still at the very least redundant - minn itself would suffice - but maybe it serves to indicate that the character came from the center of the village and not, say, from some farmhouse on its outskirts.

Be that as it may, I am now much less confident that the use of ġewwa with toponyms can solely be blamed on bad Maltese spoken by politicians or the influence of English. The current use we see might very well be just the extension of use that was first limited to specific contexts (as with Rabat) or even specific locations (as with Valletta or Mdina). So maybe my scepticism regarding the quality of the translation of Eco's The Name of the Rose into Maltese is misplaced.

But then I opened the book to the first page. As I'm sure you remember, it begins with the author's description of how he came across the absolutely 100% totes very real manuscript, naturally, that he then somewhat lost and now translates for us from his notes and memory - incidentally, a very popular trope in modern literature that turns out to have long history. This narrative is anchored by two dates: the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the date the book in question. This is what we read in the Maltese translation:

Fis-16 t'Awwissu 1969 xi ħadd għaddieli ktieb ta' awtur jismu abate Vallet, Le manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en français d'après l'édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l'Abbaye de la Source, Paris 1982).

The Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion took place in 1968. Eco's book translated here came out in 1980.

Here is how Weaver's English translation renders this passage (emphasis mine):

ON AUGUST 16, 1968, I WAS HANDED A BOOK WRITTEN by a certain Abbé Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en français d’après l’édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l’Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842). 

Considering that this is the first page, this does not bode well...