Maltese loanword typology

Comrie, Bernard; Spagnol, Michael; Puech, Gilbert; Saade, Benjamin

doi:10.1515/9783110496376-012

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Due to its history of extensive language contact, Maltese grammar and phonology show similarities to Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. This similarity has been well documented in comparative and typological studies [4,17,47]. The present study extended these studies in two ways.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

Nieder

Tomaschek

2023

PLoS ONE

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Maltese is a prime example of a language that emerged through extensive language contact, joining the two linguistic worlds of Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. Previous studies have shown this shared origin on the basis of hands-on comparative methods. However, such approaches may be biased by the researchers perspective and the selected material. To avoid this bias, we employed a naive computational method that classifies words on the basis of their phonotactics. Specifically, we trained a simple two-layer neural network on Tunisian and Italian nouns, i.e. the languages that Maltese emerged from. We used the trained network to classify Maltese nouns based on their phonotactic characteristics as either of Tunisian or of Italian origin. Overall, the network is capable of correctly classifying Maltese nouns as belonging to either of the original languages. Moreover, we find that the classification depends on whether a noun has a sound or broken plural. By manipulating the segment identity in the training input, we found that consonants are more important for the classification of Maltese nouns than vowels. While our results replicate previous comparative studies, they also demonstrate that a more fine grained classification of a language’s origin can be based on individual words and morphological classes.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

Nieder

Tomaschek

2023

PLoS ONE

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“…Due to its history of extensive language contact, Maltese grammar and phonology show similarities to Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. This similarity has been well documented in comparative and typological studies (Comrie, 2009;Comrie & Spagnol, 2016;Lucas & Čéplö, 2020). The present study extended these studies in two ways.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Maltese as a Merger of Two Worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

Nieder¹,

Tomaschek²

2023

Preprint

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Maltese is a prime example of a language that emerged through extensive language contact, joining the two linguistic worlds of Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. Previous studies have shown this shared origin on the basis of hands-on comparative methods. The present study aims at demonstrating this shared origin by employing computational methods. For this, we trained a simple two-layer neural network on Tunisian and Italian nouns, i.e. thelanguages that Maltese emerged from. We used the trained network to classify Maltese nouns as either of Tunisian or of Italian origin. Overall, the network is capable of correctly classifying Maltese nouns as belonging to either of the original languages. Moreover, we find that the classification depends on whether a noun forms a sound or broken plural. While our results replicate previous comparative studies, they also demonstrate that a more fine grained classification of a language’s origin can be based on individual words and morphological classes.

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“…Maltese presents characteristics of "layered" languages (Aikhenvald 2007: 4-7), as its structures reflect its evolutionary paths: this is especially evident in its vocabulary as the Arabic stratum of Maltese 1 , introduced when the island was taken over by the Arabs (A.D. 870), was first exposed to Sicilian, which forms its superstratum, then to Italian, its first adstratum, and more recently to English, its second adstratum (Brincat 2011: xxxv) 2 . The vocabulary of present-day Maltese contains more words of Italo-Romance than of Arabic origin, although these tallies vary substantially because of calculations made on different corpora (Comrie, Spagnol 2016): terms of Arabic etymology are clearly more numerous in texts which deal with traditional sectors (e.g. fishing, architecture) and in literature, but obviously much less so in semantic fields related to modern developments and in everyday colloquial use.…”

Section: Contact In Maltese Morphologymentioning

confidence: 99%

-ata nominalisations in Maltese: a language contact perspective

Caruana

2023

ASGM

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The -ata derivational suffix is attested frequently in nominalisations in Italo-Romance languages and its functions related to ‘event/single instance’ nouns have been documented extensively. This affix with these functions is also present in the derivational morphology of Maltese, in which diachronic and synchronic developments of -ata nominalisations reflect the evolutionary paths of this language, characterised by contact. By investigating the etymology of verbal and nominal bases, this research provides a classification of forms which take the -ata suffix in Maltese to refer to events and single instances within them, through derivation involving contact with Italian, English and Sicilian base forms. -ata nominalisations resulting from etymologically Arabic bases will also be included in the classification.

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Maltese loanword typology

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

Maltese as a Merger of Two Worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

-ata nominalisations in Maltese: a language contact perspective

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