Of course, there didn’t seem to be much of a point having a serious go at learning the language when you’re only there for a week. Especially when everyone learns English from the time they start school, with some subjects being taught through English as well. And, on the way from the airport to the hotel, I didn’t see more than one or two notices in Maltese, with dozens and dozens of adverts and posters in English.

But I’d heard some intriguing things about Maltese. It seems that the vast majority of lexical items - including numerals - are from Arabic, with a good number of Italian words (from the time of occupation, when it was the official language). Add to that a decent sprinkling of French loan words, with English used for things - such as the parts of cars - imported in recent times. (Just as car parts in Turkish come from French, the prestigious European language in the early 20th century).

So I went on line and googled ‘Common Maltese phrases’, discovering that there were indeed a lot of words from Arabic. The informal way of asking ‘how are you?’ being ‘kif int?’ or ‘‘kif entom?’ in the plural ( literally ‘how’ + ‘you’); the word for ‘good/well’ is ‘tajjeb’ (‘j’ sounding like ‘y’ in English); ‘name’ /’be called’ uses the Arabic ‘ism’ root, with ‘jien jisimni ...’ meaning ‘I am called .. / my name is ...’

Other combinations of two Arabic items popped up to. So ‘good evening’ was ‘il-leila tajjba’.  Fair enough.  But then I discovered that you could also say ‘bonswa’, i.e. the French ‘bonsoir’ minus the final <r> sound; and ‘good morning’ could sound like French ‘bonjour’, again without the <r>.

Then little bits of Italian came into play.  ‘Excuse me’ was ‘skuzi’, and the regular word for ‘thank you/thanks’ was ‘grazzi’, this time with the final Italian <e> missing. So

‘How are you?‘    ‘I’m fine, thanks”  was

‘Kif int?‘    ‘Jien tajjeb, grazzi’.

From this I predicted that ‘please’ would also be from Italian; something like ‘per favor’. But of course it wasn’t. That would have been too easy. It was ‘Jekk jogħġbok’, sounding something like ‘yaki yozhbok’ (the ‘zh’ representing the final consonant sound in ‘pleaSUre’.

(That reminded me of the 10 days I spent in Rumania back in 1970 when I noted that Latin ‘qu’ - as in ‘aqua’ and ‘quatro’ - had become a <p> sound, so that ‘water’ was ‘apa’’ and ‘four’ was ‘patro’.  Then, when I asked someone if the word for ‘horse‘ (from ‘equus’) would be something like ‘epo‘ (as in the Greek ‘hippo’) I was told that you might think so, but it actually was a loan word from the Slavonic). 

So, how much Maltese did I actually speak during the week?   Not much, really, apart from the odd greeting, expression of thanks, or giving our room number in Arabic/Maltese when we entered the dining room.

The problem is that one of two things almost invariably happened.  In that latter case, the person waiting to tick off the room numbers was just as likely simply to fail to recognise that what came out of my mouth was Maltese, expecting the person entering to speak either English or German (which covered some 95% of guests in the hotel) and not opening up their Maltese channel.

Or, even more likely, the person was not, in fact, Maltese at all. The island is part of the EU, and the place was teeming with Poles, Croats, Rumanians and whoever.  In fact one day, at reception,  I produced, with a flourish, the Maltese for ‘good afternoon’ (wara nofs in-nar it-tajjeb), only to discover that the woman at the desk was Spanish and the man Greek, with not a word of Maltese between them.   Ah well; at least I had made the effort.