The Arabic Language With A Latin Alphabet
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2023
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
The Semitic Languages: www.babbel.com/en/magazine/se...
The Curious Case of Maltese: www.labrujulaverde.com/en/201...
History Of Maltese: vassallohistory.wordpress.com...
The Maltese Language: omniglot.com/writing/maltese.htm
The Maltese Alphabet: mylanguages.org/maltese_alphab...
Maltese’s Extra Letters: www.tumblr.com/malteseboy/138...
Il-Kantilena: ballandalus.wordpress.com/201...
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Anyone watching from Malta?
No, Patty
No
No
I am
...not watching from Malta.
Maltese: The only Arabic language written in the Latin Alphabet
Cypriot Arabic: Allow me to introduce myself.
It's not strange for them to say Allah as Christians. Middle Eastern Christian communities all say Allah when speaking Arabic. It's simply the Arabic word for God.
Thanks for commenting this.
As you said, Allah is just the Arabic word for God, and Alla (without the h letter/sound) is just the Maltese word for God.
It's not really strange, it's just how languages work, but I do kind of understand why an English-speaking person thinks this is "strange".
I'm Maltese by the way.
Exactly, that was such a dumb thing to say
@@IsaacBTTF you're right, moreover if the speaker speaks only english. Knowing more than one language helps to catch it.
Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews were saying Allah for God long before Islam began.
@@challalla yeah
and they pretty much still do
On the flip side, Farsi, the language of Iran, is an Indo-European language (so the same family as Hindi, English, Russian, etc) that uses the Arabic script.
Almost all Indo Iranian languages west of India are written in Perso-Arabic script.
@@IlluminatingLamp yess, in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well
@@o_s-24 Afghans speak Dari, a dialect of Farsi. Another dialect of Farsi is Tajik, spoken in Tajikistan and written in the Cyrillic alφaβet.
@@IlluminatingLamp Kurdish uses Latin alphabet mostly and is slowly being shifted to use Latin only
@@tutigseg i mean kurds in iran still use arabic script tho right?
Imagine if instead of Spanish people spamming ñ everywhere, the Maltese spammed ħ everywhere.
Then Polish spams Z everywhere
And Turkish spams ğ everywhere
And Romania spamming țțțț
Germans: ßßßßßß
And Welsh - LL LL LL LL everywhere
The allah thing is interesting because in spanish there's the word "ojala" (If god allows) which stayed from arabic.
Christian arabs also use the word Allah in the middle east ,the speaker doesn't evn know that
In Maltese we also say 'jekk Alla jrid' which also means 'if God allows'.
@@DanielMemeSmith jrid also apparently came from Arabic it's yrid/erid means wants (if Allah wants) it's used in local dialects.
@@Meer101some christian in indonesia also uae allah.
Indeed, although contrary to popular belief, it didn't etymologically came from insha'Allah but rather from the Al-Ándalus variant "Law shaꞌa Allah" (lauxalá>loxalá>oxalá>ojalá)
Arab teams in competitive eSports write standard Arabic with latin alphabet replacing absent letters with arabic numerals like ain (عين) being replaced with 3.
that practice originated from early cell phones which had texting function but didn't support arabic alphabet, so arabic speakers resorted to using latin alphabet and numbers for the sounds that don't exist in latin. To this day it's easier to type in latin alphabet than switch your keyboard to arabic
In Lebanon it's done everywhere. And it's really bad. If they don't pay attention to it, soon noone will use the Arabic script anymore
@@o_s-24
Same in Egypt, many of my friends type Arabic in Latin all the time when it's totally unnecessary, even some of them screw up when they try typing in Arabic
a b t th j hh x d dh r z s sh ss dd tt tth ae gh f q k l m n h w y (this is still hideous, especially tth)
a b t þ j ħ x d ð r z s š ss dd tt ðð æ ġ f q k l m n h w y (sure/maybe)
@@interbeamproductions More like: a (2) b t th j 7 5 d th r z s sh s d t th 3 8 f q k l m n h w y. Yeah...
This was quite interesting. In Latin-America we still use Arabic loaned words in our Spanish too! This is because Spain reconquered their land from the Muslim kingdom before colonizing Spanish speaking Latin-America resulting in a similar phenomenon of Latin written Arabic with the a Spanish pronunciation being spread across our foreign nations. Examples of this being: Alacrán=scorpion, aceité=cooking oil, Azúcar=Sugar, Camisa=Shirt, arroz=rice, jirafa=giraffe, Taza=mug, Ojalá=Hopefully/Godwilling:)
Camisa is not Arabic. It comes from Latin.
@@Gubbe51 maybe its like قميص
@@Gubbe51 Kamis is also used in arabic, but yeah, it could come indeed from the latin language originally.
@@huriale1617 In India they have Shalwar Kamees. Maybe they are related, but Latin camisa is well documented.
Camisa is not a loan from Latin. The word had its roots in Arabic before. For example: "Tacamus", which means assuming others personality, or appearance. And then why would Arabs borrow it from Latin if the Arabs were the ones who were selling almost everything to Romans and Greeks : silk, clothes, perfumes, fruit- vegetable seeds, gum? That's why, on the other hand, Arabs borrowed some names of the Greek and Roman coins.
Fun fact: Sicilians from Italy and Iberians (Spain + Portugal) used to speak a form of Arabic as well before the 12th century
And still have influence from them with vocabulary and Spanish with pronunciation.
That's because malta Iberia and Sicily were at one point all controlled by the Islamic caliphate and later on the emirate of Sicily and the different Andalusian kingdoms.
Al Andalus
and a lot of spanish words are from arabic
@@lordsiomai We don't really use them so much unless we talk of food or some clothes, we tend to use latin words or native american words. In my case as my mother is mexican we have tendency for use nahuatl words and some mayan ones, but in general that is the idea, only food (maily condiments) or some clothes.
There was a sister language of Maltese spoken on the nearby island of Pantelleria (now administered by Sicily). While it went extinct in the seventeenth century, it left an impact both on the local dialect and on place names, the latter ones don't look at all Italian
I was always curious about Pantelleria and Lampedusa, being such lonely islands in the Mediterranean. Whilst having been twice in Malta, I never made it there.
Cyrillic is also used for a ton of different languages. Latin alphabet isn’t the only one that does it. It’s just the most known to be. Arabic used to represent a bunch of langu in Africa and Asia before the introduction of the Latin script
It's more like if people close to you have a way of writing that suits your needs and you don't have one you take it. If you conquer places, you want the people under you writing like you (you don't want them getting silly thoughts about cultural determination or anything)
But anyways, the point of the video was just to state that Maltese is the only Semitic language to use the Latin script and that its peculiar in that it is the only one and scripts made to encode the plethora of sounds needed would've been better suited to it, not that Latin is used to write languages outside of Indo European ones. If anyone thought that claim was being made, they need to step out of their bubble and realize the rest of the world can also see everyone else and is therefore already familiar with the broad use of Cyrillic and Arabic characters to write other languages.
I'm Lebanese, and it's incredible how I passively understand Maltese. In fact, my mom works at a university department dedicated to teaching Arabic, and at one point, she had a Maltese student. They were talking in her office, when she had to take a phone call (in Arabic, of course). Said student told her that he understood what she had said, and so they carried on talking, she in Arabic and he in Maltese. Anyway, I'd love to visit Malta someday. Not only does it look beautiful, but I would definitely have a nice time linguistically.
maltese is a different language, although it did come from an arabic dialect, it diverged so much it became different language all together. there is lots of english and italian loanwords in maltese.
I believe I've heard that Maltese and specifically the Tunisian dialect of Arabic is about 70% intelligible still! :) I've seen some videos about that in the past
So it's similar to English in how it was a Germanic language, but then had a huge Latin influence due to the Roman empire.
the Arabic "dialects" are basically languages too, during the medieval ages French, Portuguese, Spanish etc.. were also considered vulgar latin dialects although they were already very different. Same thing with Arabic dialects nowadays
Not unlike the other Arabic languages
@DropkicktheDecepticon Lunar studio didn't say it was. Its origins were from a dialect of Arabic in the same way French came from a dialect of Latin.
"mediteranian meets arabic can't be found in any other place."
The Levant: Am I a joke to you?
Jokes aside, in Maltese we say "Lvant" which literally means "East", which I think is derived from Arabic. Was quite surprised when I found out the region was named that way.
@@realeggboi wow, I always thought it was some kind of french root.
@@somekek6734 upon further inspection I now realise it's Italian, not Arabic. It comes from the word 'levante'.
what are you talking about?. the Levant speak and write in Arabic.
@@salimd7842Israel speaks Hebrew
Tunisian that now lives in australia here. Maltese is really easy to understand for me. Since, as I grew up learning french and english as well as my native Arabic, I can pick up on the words of latin origin in maltese and understand the sentences. Just to be honest sounds a bit like the libyan italian-arabic creole I used to hear Libyans sometimes speaking (I lived right on the border with Libya)
And the Latin alphabet comes from the ancient Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Carthaginian was Phonecian. Carthage was a Phoenician colony which took over most of their overseas Empire, when Tyre was conquered.
There are also extant European languages written in Hebrew, and there were versions of Spanish written in Arabic.
Like Yiddish, or literally ‘Jewish.’ אוי וויי איז מיר. Other than Yiddish and Hebrew, and possibly Aramaic, I know no languages written in the Hebrew script.
@@HippieVeganJewslim Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) , Italkian (Judeo-Italian), Yevanitika.(Judaeo-Greek), exist too. They're actually used to be more.
@@ronmaximilian6953 I’ve heard of Ladino, gracias, but I forgot about it; lo siento. The other two are new to me, so grazie e ευχάριστο!
Greeks are not Europeans! The Greeks themselves know that now, the Greek language has a lot of Arabic in it's appearance too. 600 years after Christ is the Greek language, the Greeks lived all over Iran and migrate to better countries and then think it belongs to them
@Graeme Duncan Italians hail from the Middle East aren't Europeans either! Greeks have nothing to do with Etruscans, the Etruscan language is still spoken today. And no, there was never a manuscript where it says Greek. The Romans were Etruscans and the Italians are of Arabic blood
Also some Belorussian Tatars written Belorussian in arabic script.
Jeah, but back then, they named "Litvins"
I didn't know the physical reduced Plank's constant was actually a letter in an actual script for an actual natural language.
Yeah like in the word for voice. Il-leħen
That was a cool bonus to an interesting video.
There is also a few things left over from French rule in Maltese like the greeting ‘Bongu’.
It could also be from the 200+ years of Hospatallier Rule of the island. I mean many knights came from France.
You see, the point is, when a language is this unique and has such a cool history, l dont think getting loanwords is a good idea, because you will start an irreversible trend that will end up killing the language alltogether. I see this with my language(albanian). People are using more english words every single day. So be creative and invent new words from existing roots
@@albanian_barcelona_fan Like "Anglish"? That's English with Latin removed or reduced. Don't say "bus" or "omnibus," say "folkwain." German could do this, but "bus" would be "Volkswagen."
So cool! As a french I wouldn't think they use my language for daily greeting lol
@@albanian_barcelona_fan everywhere in Europe it happens also Asia, South America and other places. Internet helps this movement.
We use a lot of arabic terms in our translation of Catholicism not just Alla. For example "randan" (lent), "għid" (easter), "tqarbin" (holy communion), "qrar" (reconciliation), "żwieġ" (marriage), "magħmudija" (baptism), etc.
I can only understand randan (sounds like Ramadan), Holy communion, zawag, and what in my region is called ma3mudeeia.. Qrar means decision in my region . Ghid I assume comes from 3eed, meaning holiday. It seems Maltese uses Islamic names for Christian holidays and sacred events/Items. Also it seems gh in maltese equals ع (3) in Arabic.
@@habibi_sport312 Yes għ=ع (but for us it's 99% of the time a silent letter).
What I wrote about Għid being Easter would be in parallel with Eid al-Fitr in Islam (from what I remember my friends saying) but I get what you're saying that it's just the general word for holiday. I believe for you Christmas is called Eid al-milad for example (which we incidentally call il-Milied)
@@atrumluminarium Yes, I assumed correctly. This is so interesting!
I assume from the arabic words رمضان، عيد، قربان، زواج، معمدانية
a lot of people have the assumption that because of the geographical divide (among other things) of the Mediterranean Sea, us Sicilians and the North Africans are vastly different cultures, and Malta is where they mix somewhat. The reality is that the central Mediterranean region is more homogenous than you'd believe, not in spite of the Sea that divides us, but because of the Sea uniting us. People have been crossing the Mediterranean and trading for millennia and if you come to Mazara del Vallo, to Tunis and to Valletta, you'll find out just how many similarities there are.
Exactly! For me as a Tunisian, Maltese people and Sicilians will always be closer to us than say people from the arabian peninsula
@@hamzahammami22 Same for me and say people from Northern Italian cities like Milan, Turin or Venice. Tunisians and Maltese are far closer cultures to Sicily.
@@mygetawayart as a sicilian, the maltese are of course closer to us than the tunisians ( the muslim world is different from ours in many ways ), but I deeply respect Tunisians people and the ties we had with them in the past
@@esti-od1mz Aren't modern day Maltese pretty much just people descended from Sicilians that spoke Arabic and reconverted back to Christianity? I think it would only make sense that the Maltese are like Sicilians.
@@murkywaters5502 the maltese and the sicilians share most of their dna. The maltese are mostly the descendants of siculoarabics, but keep in mind that the siculoarabics were not genetically close to northafricans or arabs from the gulf
Phoenicians didn't speak Arabic, they spoke phoenician which is also a semetic language.
well we do now lol
Great video though I have some notes! The Phoenician language isn’t the basis of Malti, but rather could be an influence on the language. Arabic is absolutely the basis of Maltese. The word “Allah” (الله in Arabic) is simply the Arabic word for God, coming from the same root for God as Hebrew “Elohim/El” (אֶלֹהִים/ אֶל). The word Allah doesn’t refer only to the god of the Islamic faith, but to any god when speaking Arabic. Christians in Arabic speaking countries use many of the same phrases as muslims using Allah (bismillah, inshallah, mashallah, allah yasalamkum, etc.) and do so in the name of the Christian god. Sorry for the lengthy rant I’m just a big fan of Semitic languages
Not really tho
Allah is specifically the abrahamic god, like God is specifically THE God. A deity would be illah (Allah is thought to be a contraction of Al illah).
Kinda like Deus in latin languages is God but deus is other deities
@@Lucasp110Thank you for saying this, Allah is the word for the Abrahamic god, but Illah is for God in general. Otherwise the testimony of faith would be something like There is no Allah but Allah or لا الله الا الله
@@Lucasp110 That distinction exists in English as well God (with a capital "g") is the abrahamic God, while god (with a lower case "g") can refer to any deity what so ever, so for example Zeus is a god but not the God. That's also true in my native Finnish where "jumala" mean " a god" or "a deity" but "Jumala" (with a capital "J") refers to the Abrahamic (often Christian as Finland is dominantly Christian nation) God.
Yeah, I had similar notes in my head. Came here for this...thanks
@@Lucasp110
Doesn't have to be actually.
Linguistically speaking, it's very likely that Allah is the reduced form of "Al-Ilah".
Arabs often drop glottal stops in words commonly used, there are many examples for that, like the word " lu'lu' " can be pronounced "lulu"
So Allah is just God with capital G.
It just happens that Abrahamic religions adopt this concept of one God
3:00 god in aramaic (the language that jesus christ peace be upon him spoke with) is alaha, so a Christian nation using it is not strange at all
No, It's Alaha or Elaha in Aramaic.
Not to mention that every single arab christian, millions of them, naturally call God Allah and called God Allah way before they heard of Muhammad, the Quran or Islam. This fact should have stopped perplexing people long time ago, but what can you do.
@@1sanitat1 even pagan arabs used it, Allah is the arabic word for God, it's that simple but people still find it confusing.
@@barakato Not exactly. the word "God" in Arabic is "Ilah", but the word "Allah" means the True, One and Supreme God.
For example: the pagan Arabs used to believe in many gods among these gods is Allah and they believe that Allah is the supreme God that's because they used to worship other gods just to get closer to Allah.
In Arabic, word "Allah" is a word that connot be pluralized but word "God" or "Ilah" are plural-able so: "god" -> "gods" and "Ilah" -> "Aliha".
So in Recap:
word "Ilah" is an adjective. (to mean god)
and word "Allah" is a name. (of the True God )
and that's why you find non-Arab Muslims say "Allah"
@@save_sudan_and_palestine you're 100% true, every religious person finds his god as the superior one so that's why most non-muslim arabs also use it.
and there is also the word "rab" that means a god or sometimes a lord.
man i love Arabic, it's my favorite language so far.
As an Arabic speaker. I want now to see what if Latin and Germanic language were written in the Arabic script (as we already have some old and unknown examples, most famous of which is the Ottoman Turkish, but apparently there was also Albanian, Bosnian, etc... Which had an Arabic script at some point).
But I want to see how would English look like, or German, or Swedish, or Spanish.
Would be similar letters as in Urdu/Pashto.
Early forms of Spanish and Mozarabic (romance language spoken in Al-andalus) were often written in the Arabic script.
The closest I can think of is Yiddish, it's a German descendant in Hebrew script.
ھائ، ھو آر یو مئ فرند
Living Indo-European languages written in a modified Arabic script include Persian, Kurdish and Urdu.
Maltese is derived from Arabic, not Phonecian, even if both are Semitic languages
Our neighbour's in the house across the street from the house I lived in when I was growing up were from Malta. I was a friend of the youngest two kids. Since Malta in the Mediterranean is just south of Sicily and north of Libya in North Africa they spoke more than one language. They spoke English all the time at home. In Malta they could understand and speak some Sicilian Italian spoken in Sicily and the southern part of Italy. They could also understand a bit when someone was speaking the Berber Arabic language spoken in most of Libya and other parts of North Africa along the Mediterranean.
Wrong it's Phoenician with Arab influence.
Yeah its kinda like saying english is dervied from old german
Well arabic and latin are ultimately both derived from Phoenician so technically yes it is.
@@hx0d neither language is derived from Phoenician. Lain is an Indo European language, not even remotely related to Phoenician. And whole Arabic and Phoenician are both Semitic languages,, they are on different branches of central Semitic languages
I mean it’s not exactly strange that they use the word Allah for God, they speak an Arabic dialect and Allah is the word for God in Arabic. Also Arabic speaking Christians all over the Middle East also say Allah. Not to mention other Semitic languages like Assyrian who’s word for God is Alaha. The word is Semitic in origin so it’ll be similar across Semitic languages.
3:05 Allah is actually the Arabic equivilent of the word "God" (with the capital G), so it would be used for any monotheistic God. Muslims also worship YHWH like Jews and Christians, so the use of the same word despite religion makes even more sense. Arab Christians use a lot of "Muslim" phrases like inshallah ("if God wills") and subhannullah ("glory to God")
Etymologically speaking, "Allah" is a combination of "Al" (the) and "illah" (god), thus literally meaning "The [only] God"
@@imaadhaq540 from what I also know "El" was the word for gods in general in Sumerian, but it also was the name for the highest god in their pantheon. This word can be found a lot of times in atleast Christian texts (but I wouldn't be surprised if you found it elsewhere like the Qur'an) with things alike "Emanuel": "God among us"= "emanu+el", or "Gabriel": "strength of god".
@@lorenzo8208 Interesting! I doubt that has much to do with this though since "al" is just Arabic for "the."
@@imaadhaq540 yeah, but maybe something like "illah"
@@lorenzo8208 Ohh I see. The proto semitic word for "god" is "il"/"el" so I think you are correct.
I’m Maltese and I’m twelve. The gh in our language is Ghajn and is pronounced iyn. The h with a cross is the normal h sound and without a cross works the same as the gh(it has no sound unless it is at the end of a word or next to a gh. The s with a dot has the normal sound of z like in English but without a dot it makes a ts sound like zalzett which means sausage and is pronounced tsaltsett. What many people don’t know about malta is that our two official languages are Maltese and English and now most people know English better.
I heard most Maltese speak italian, do you or anyone you know?
@@EvilEgg331 most people know it because not too long ago tv was only in Italian and most people learn it at school along with English, Maltese and french
@@EvilEgg331 Only old people are fluent in Italian nowadays. Under British rule, there was a huge debate about which language should be primarily used, either Italian, which had been widely used since the control under the Knights Hospitaller, or English. In the end, English won, thus becoming an official language, but Italian was still widely spoken, until the younger generations started learning English as a mandatory language. So, to answer your question, most Maltese don't speak Italian, but most people above around 40 years may understand Italian.
Bro I love people who say "It's pronounced like zalzett" as though we already know the language and know how that word would sound lmao it's awesome that this bad transliteration deal is universal in humans
Very knowledgeable 12 year old friend 😊
languages that borrow a script from a diffrent family always fascinate me, like maltes, viet, and yiddish for example
Technically English falls into that category
Yiddish os European
@@the_linguist_ll lol you're right!!
and every non-latin language using the latin script
@@user-lq7qj8ue1xYiddish is a mixture of Hebrew and German though
hello from malta, our language is pretty strange. we got arabic, italian, french etc mashed together. And we pronounce Alla a bit different then Allah. we also got laħam (meat) i think. im happy to see someone talk about our crazy language
As a Kuwaiti myself, seeing some news broadcasts in Maltese, I could understand a good chunk of what is being said. It’s rather fascinating.
@@alarabi98 oh wow
As a Tunisian with some knowledge of italian i can pretty much understand 80% of what's being said. I find it uncanny that the accent and pronunciation is so similar to the Tunisian dialect, it's like hearing a native tunisian speaking a weird language.
@@butt3rcxp_572 interesting, never heard of that place tho
@@wolfbanesons what Tunisia ? It's right next to you lol
Bro why is it strange? The translation is literally god.
It's like saying it's weird a Russian speaking Jew says Bog. It's just the word in their native language.
@@NeonBeeCat Right. Like an Arabic Christian calling the trinity Allah.
Allahu used by the Christian Arabic not just a Muslim
“It's wild to me that an incredibly Christian country like Malta is using the name Allah for their God.” Antiochian Orthodox Church, and if you think it is similar enough, the Syriac church says “Alāhā”.
"the whole nation has this unique Mediterranean meets Arabian vibe to it not really found anywhere else on the planet"
Southern Spain: I am a joke to you?
Andalusia is amazing but the Catholics ruined it.
When I watch the title, I thought it is Maltese immediately.
I thought it was gonna be about transliteration of near Eastern languages into Latin script, which sometimes includes Arabic numerals in the middle of a word! Hope Patrick covers that some day.
I'm glad this one is about Maltese though. Fascinating language and an official EU one now too, of course. An old school friend of mine is half-Maltese despite having been born just up the road from me in North Wales.
The Eastern Roman Empire was never the Byzantine Empire- they and their neighbors considered themselves Romans. In fact it was the King of Rome who split the Roman Empire between west and east that resides over the Eastern Roman Empire since it’s inception.
If the video was about Romanian, its title would be "The Latin Language Still Spoken in Eastern Europe".
fun fact: romania used to use the cyrillic alphabet
@@LeOrtacud, уеs, until the 1860s.
And there's mozarabic, an Latin language that used the Arabic alphabet
Have you heard of Maltralian? It's a dialect of Maltese spoken in parts of Australia.
In Pakistan, the Latin script is also heavily used mainly on social media and texting. Its language, Urdu, which is Turkish word "Ordu" means military, army, which itself is a mixture is languages, mainly Hindi, Farsi, Arabic, Turkish and loan words from English and some little Portuguese, is originally written in the "Nashtaliq" script, which is Perso-Arabic. The Romanized version is called Roman Urdu.
This was really interesting. I lived there for many years and the language is deep, complex, ancient and fascinating. I think many traditonal Maltese people resist the more Anglicised version of their language and prefer the version which is more Italian and less Arabic.
That poem you showed from the 15th century had no Latin influence you sau but isn't it called, "Il Cantalina"? Isn't that an Italian title?
I've noticed in Maltese that both "q" and "gh" are silent except in "Gharghur" which is an ancient town. Overall, it is less guttural than Arabic and I've heard Libyans and Maltese speak to each other in their languages with mutual understanding.
More people of Maltese heritage should reconnect with their unique culture, language and people. It proves that, despite the chaos, colonialism has produced some fascinating cultural outcomes and the Caribbean islands are similar.
Hi, Maltese speaker here, I fully agree with what you said that the Maltese language and culure should be more recognised.
I have some lingual corrections if you're interested:
'q' is not a silent consonant, it's a glottal stop.
Also, although 'għ' is silent for the most part, it is spelled like an 'h' at the end of a word and it functions as a vowel lengthener and such.
for example:
"bagħad" ('he hated') is pronounced 'baat',
"mixgħul" ('lit'/'switched on') is pronounced 'mish-aawl'/'mish-ewl',
"Għid" ('Easter') is pronounced 'aayt'/'eyt',
"bejgħ" ('sale') is pronounced 'bey-h'.
Plus "Il-Kantalina" is indeed derived from Italian.
@@graemeduncan1232 yeah, it is common for different dialects to have different vowels in words when spoken. Since the language is semitic and most words are built on consonantal roots, it doesn't really matter if you deviate the vowels from what is standard, as long as the consonants are still the same. For example, "Seqejja" and "Saqajja" both mean 'my leg'.
Hi, @@DanielMemeSmith. Thanks for your response. I was meant to respond ages ago but I couldn't find the video notification and forgot. That's really interesting about the letters and pronunciations. Yes, I remember "q" is a glottal stop like in "Bubaqra", but the "gh" is a little confusing. I've only very hard locals pronounce "Gharghur" as "Gar-goor" but that's probably because they don't say the "Hal" before it but I always hear locals pronounce "Hal Ghaxaq" as "Hal Asha".
Do you understand any Arabic? I've heard Libyan and Tunisian are the closest to Maltese.
@@MCharlerySmith Yeah, Arabic and its variants might be partially intelligible to us.
The language gets confusing for beginners but for me it is an intuitive and down-to-earth language, it has some exceptions to the rules (i mean, what natural language doesn't?) but once you get those down it's plain sailing because there aren't many silent letters except for 'għ' and 'h'. As I said before, these are special consonants because they serve more as grammatical functions than plain consonants.
Also you might hear 'Ħal Għaxaq' as 'Hal Asha' because when the glottal stop is at the end it sounds faint and negligible. 'Għargħur' is the only exception word which has 'għ' commonly pronounced as 'g', so you shouldn't worry much about these consonants.
Most commonly, 'għ' lengthens vowel sounds: 'għa' (aa), 'għe' (ee), 'għo' (oo); and changes them: 'għi' (pronounced 'ay'/'ey'), 'għu' (pronounced 'ew','aw').
@@DanielMemeSmith. Thanks for all of that! What's the difference in vowel sound between "jew" and "ghu" then? This is all great info for me. I didn't know the gh elongated vowel sounds. Are you a Maltese author or tutor? Please let me know if you have a Maltese language page of your own.
Did you know that Malta was once governed by a major Catholic military order known as the Knights Hospitaller around the time of the Crusades as a major base of operations? Impressive that an organization of crusaders could have such a major influence on its history. Even its capital, Valletta, was named after an important leader of the Knights Hospitaller, and its national symbol features their strangely square and symmetrical 8-pointed cross symbol that came to be named after itself: the Maltese Cross.
Also, did you know that there is a kind of gear mechanism called the Geneva drive, which is also called a Maltese cross mechanism because of the shape of one of its gears?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive
Maltese here, interesting to see you have Maltese heritage :0
same
Arabic is not a unique script, as it is also used by Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and many others
It was also formally used by Turkish
Even when it's used in these other languages it's still called the Arabic script and being used in other languages doesn't really take anything away from its uniqueness.
Same thing with the Latin script, we continue to call it Latin whether it's used in English, French, Spanish or Italian.
Awesome video. I've learned a bit. Thank you Patrick
Italian Language
+
Arabic Language
=
Maltanese language
God : What the hell is this
@@DanielMemeSmith well it sounds better and plus you still know what I meant anyway
@@DanielMemeSmith idk it just does Mall-tan-ease Vs Mal-tease
Maltanese?
Videos like this make me glad that I subscribed
Nice Video! Would be great to see if you could make more videos about Asian languages & scripts, such as...
🇮🇳 हिन्दी
🇧🇩 বাংলা
🇮🇳 తెలుగు
🇮🇳 தமிழ்
🇮🇳 ગુજરાતી
🇵🇰 اُردو
🇮🇳 ಕನ್ನಡ
🇮🇳 ଓଡିଆ
🇮🇳 മലയാളം
🇮🇳 ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
🇧🇹 ལྷ་སའི་སྐད་
🇱🇰 සිංහල
🇲🇲 မြန်မာစကား
🇹🇭 ภาษาไทย
🇱🇦 ພາສາລາວ
🇰🇭 ភាសាខ្មែរ
...and these are spoken by Tens of Millions of speakers!!
It's truly fascinating and as European i feel bad that so many other westerner don't realize the diversity and wealth in South Asian languages
Also just a suggestion for a topic, where does the name Bougainville come from? I've search a lot and only found sources saying it's from the person with the last name Bougainville but no indication of how the name came about.
Obviously the guy came from a town full of bogans.
I imagine Bougain is probably a proper noun (likely a person or ethnic group) and the -ville part is just a suffix meaning “town”
@@SamAronow I’ve always thought the Australians who are in-the-know must be cracking up at the fact that there will soon be a new country in the region that sounds like it’s called “Boganville”, lmao.
It was named after the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville. It's also the origin of the name of the Bougainvillea genus of flowers
bougainville is also the name of a flower often found in Southeast Asia and Pacific Islands.
OMG! One of my favourite channels writing about where I'm from! :D
Maltese is mixture of Tunisian Arabic, Latin, Italian, Sicilian, Greek, Norman French, Napoleonic French, Aragonese Spanish and English.
FYI, the word "Semitic" is pronounced the way it's spelled: /se-MI-tik/, not /se-ME-tik/.
If you learn Arabic you realise why you can't use the Latin alphabet for the language. Three fall under th, three are h, two fall under s, two fall under d despite them all being different, even if only subtly. Even worse some sounds aren't even representable in the Latin alphabet with ع being represented with the letter a or number 3
As an Arab, there's ways for actual appropriate transcription of Arabic into Latin, but the terrible chat alphabet is not an acceptable way
Is it possible? Of course it is as teenagers we did it effortlessly.
Is it necessary? Absolutely not.
Just use diacritics
@@ernestomarin230 or just use the arabic script, btw I'm not referring to any translation just the use of the arabic language in communication
@Graeme Duncan Better to learn fus7a than maltese...
There is also a version of Arabic from Cyprus (Cypriot Maronite Arabic) which is usually written with Latin or Greek letters.
I'm Lebanese and Christian and our word for "God" is "Allah." I think what most people in the West fail to understand is that Allah is the Arabic word for God. The Muslims' "Allah" is the same "God" we Christians believe in. Also, interestingly, since the Internet era, we use Latin alphabet to type in Arabic words in chats, because most people find it easier or only have Latin letters keyboards. We use numbers to substitute for the letters that don't exist in the Latin alphabet.
My mother was born on Malta in 1924. When we were in Kenya in 1958-61 she found she could understand quite a bit of Swahili, which is also very heavily influenced by Arabic.
Very interesting! Yes. Sawahili is a Bantu (African) mixed with some Arabic.
@@BlackSeedOil20 Swahili wasn't really one language because it was a mixture of Arabic with many local Bantu languages and so varied locally a lot. My father said that the Swahili in Malawi was very different from the Swahili in Kenya that he knew. However, it has become increasingly standardized across East Africa.
Maltese and the Tunisian dialect are the most similar afaik. Tho idk if the 1/3rd of Arabic being understood was Tunisian or if Tunisian is even more.
i believe it would be based off of MSA, Modern Standard Arabic
Fascinating video, although I can't understand the long and irrelevant part of the video discussing Punic settlement in the area considering it has absolutely nothing to do with why Maltese exists. It's like claiming the Persians stopped being Zoroastrian because Alexander the Great invaded them. Whether he conquered them or not, the Muslims would still dominate the region a thousand years later.
Also, to state the Punic or Phoenician people spoke Arabic is incredibly wrong. They're both Semitic languages, but that doesn't make them the same or one descended from the other. English and Danish are both Germanic languages, but they are incredibly distinct and neither came from the other.
Your graphics are always the cutest!
This is So intresting and I had NO IDEA of this fact! Thank you so much for these awesome videos man! May allah bless you!
"it's wild to me that an incredibly Christian country like Malta is using 'Allah' for their God".
bruh, Allah literally just means God in Arabic.
Isn't the word "God" sounds like "Ilah" in Arabic?
@@user-ft5xq6qd7x more like
eelah
also both are correct.
@@user-ft5xq6qd7xilah means a god. With small g. Like saying a god of (something) like Zeus god of thunder. Allah is God with capital G. Or THE god.
They say La ilah ilah Allah which is There is no god but God.
@@Tummamu I understood.
Wow, I didn't think you had Maltese heritage. Every Maltese person is bilingual by nature, so it's easier to learn other European languages, both Semitic and Romance + Germanic. I'm proud to be a native there.
Unfortunately there are some inaccruracies with this video. There is no linguistic continuation between the language spoken prior to the arab conqueust and Maltese, so Phoenician and Maltese are as related as Phoenician and Arabic. Also, siculo-arabic wasn't really a blend of latin and arabic, but just another arabic dialect. The romance (latin) input in Maltese occurred almost exclusively after the Norman conquest. I say almost exclusively because there are a few words remnant from African Latin in Maltese but also shared with Maghrebi Arabic dialects, but these are just a handful of words. Furthermore the reason latin script was chosen to write Maltese was simply because the only people who could write at the time (nobles and priests) only knew how to read and write italian, so they adopted the italian alphabet to mimic as best as they can Maltese sound.
You said about the "ħ", it was supposed to be pronounced like an English (you said "normal") "h", if at the end of a word. I'm trying, but it would be almost inaudible, unless really pushed it. Is it really like an "h" or something more throaty, like the Scottish "ch" in "loch"?
Maltese speaker here, to let you know that 'ħ' is pronounced like english 'h' regardless of position in a word. you can make it throaty if you'd like.
also letter 'h' (the one without the dash) is mostly silent, except for when it's at the end of a word which turns into the aforementioned 'ħ'.
the digraph letter 'għ' is silent but it lengthens and changes vowel sounds. it also sounds like 'ħ' at the end of a word.
examples:
"ħanżir" ('pig') is pronounced ''han-ziyr",
"deheb" ('gold') is pronounced 'de-eb',
"għalih" ('for him') is pronounced 'aalih',
"bagħad" ('he hated') is pronounced 'baat',
"mixgħul" ('lit'/'switched on') is pronounced 'mish-aawl'/'mish-ewl',
"Għid" ('Easter') is pronounced 'aayt'/'eyt',
"bejgħ" ('sale') is pronounced 'bey-h'.
Keep in mind that the Maltese don't call *their God* Alla, but it's the general word for God. Zeus is an Alla, Thor is an Alla, the Christian and Islamic God is Alla.
We do say alla to refer to any god, but Alla with a capital A refers only to the Christian God, so Zeus is an alla, but God is Alla.
@@realeggboi That's cool, thanks for the clarification! I guess that works the same in English and my primary language which is Dutch.
Yeah its the word for god
Saw this thumb nail and knew immeadiately it was about Malta
I've been curious where nameexplain is from; been trying to place the accent (the phonemes are fairly different from mine) and it's interesting to hear Maltese heritage may be part of it
Interesting video. Did the alphabet make Maltese popular to study abroad?
Only half a million people speak Maltese so I highly doubt it.
Maltese really is indeed rich in history and an interesting language.
Moroccans text and comment in Arabic using Latin alphabet
That's exciting. Please, make the whole video about Maltese alphabet.
wow such a nice topic, I was thinking about it yesterday what if we want to convert the Arabic to Latin such what the turk did from Arabic alphabet to Latin's one
Why do you want to convert the beautiful Arabic to the Latin ?. The reason why the Turks converted the Arabic letters into Latin is because the secularists who hated Islam at this time took control of Turkey... Turkic Muslims suffered at this time and Western culture was imposed on them by force.
It was actually done by the Lebanese poet Said Akl and he tried to get it in use in newspapers but he started just before the civil war broke out so it never got used. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Said_Akl
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How far back is your Maltese ancestry? In certain cases, you may be eligible for citizenship (and have access to the EU) if you can get the documentation needed!
Name Explain: "If you haven't got the point by now, this is a really unique language, one unlike any other on the planet."
Basque: "Txantxa bat al naiz zuretzat? (Am I a joke to you?)"
I literally made my own alphabet because I'm an arab
Maltese is a beautiful language, I commend it.
same
naqbel
I want to bring attention also to the amazigh/berber element of maltese. The origin of maltese is the tunisian dialect of arabic.. which is itself a mix of arabic mixed with relics of phonecian, latin and amazigh (the original language in the area). Tunisians can understand a lot of maltese, the latter having even tunisian amazigh words in their vocabulary. Such as, fekruna (tortoise) bebbux (snails) farfetto (butterfly) gerzuma (throat) kermus (figs) zanzan (to buzz, to hum) zoghzogh (young children).. etc.
In tunisia, there is a metaphor when trying to say something is very far, "in malta" or "to malta". Because for a period of time, malta was considered the east most part of tunisians.
bro maltese comes from siculo arabic we are european not african
@@LeftHandSupremacist where do you think siculo arabic came from?
@@graemeduncan1232 i agree
Kinda makes me wish Duolingo had a course for Maltese.
duolingo is expanding dw it will prolly get one in a few years (should any1 ask for it)
Finnaly Eritrea is mention thank you
I wouldn’t say them saying “alla” is strange. Germans say “Gott” it’s just a word for god. In Japanese, it’s Kami or 神. Alla and allah, aren’t “Muslim/islamic” words. It’s also not the “Islamic” God. It’s just the literal word for God. Not to mention, the Islamic and Christian God are the exact same God.
True
That dot above the letters appears in the previous script to write Irish before it was replaced with a h
Mozarabic speakers to Maltese speakers: wanna hang out?
Our language is 78% similar to Russian. Some middle east countries such as Iran, Morocco and Israel don’t always speak Arabic but sometimes they do.
In Israel we mostly speak Hebrew English or Russian, Arabic is only in west bank, and Haifa
@@R0DBS2 moroccan jews
Morocco always speaks Arabic, some speak tamzigh but the majority speaks Arabic in their dialects because as you may not know every region in every Arab country have different dialects but it's all Arabic . And the ones who born and raised outside of morocco are the one that usually don't speak it obviously.
Iran is not Arab country of course they are not speaking Arabic they have their own language and hebrew is spoken in occupied Palestine but also Arabic for the Arabs there.
@@R0DBS2 uh oh
Fun fact: because many apps and chats do not support Arabic, we resort to writing in Arabic but with the English alphabet... and we substitute the lacking letters with numbers.
For example: a7na n9'6r nktb k4a a7yanan
And yes... such monstrosity hurts the eyes (:
الفرانكو الحقير ربنا يكفينا شره😂 مش بطيقه نهائي
Same thing with hebrew
I hate it so much when Arabic speakers write Arabic in this chat languages, i skip reading if i see this look it's very annoying and struggle to read.
All I understood from that is 'aħna' (we) and 'nikteb' (write)
@@PJDubbing It's
We have to write like this sometimes
احنا نضطر نكتب كذا أحيانا
Had no idea of these tbh I just thought maltese was a Italian language with Arabic influence turns out it was the other way around 😅
Just so you know, 'God' in Arab is 'Allah'. That's how Arab Christians say, and how it says in the Arabic translation of the Bible. I don't know what else you expected.
Muslims worship YHWH like we do, even though their religion is horribly distorted. Therefore, in correct English, their God should never be left untranslated as 'Allah', but in fact translated as 'God'. Likewise, the God of us Catholic Christians is in Arabic the same 'Allah', although the theology is wildly different.
"Anti-Semitism" should be an ideology of hating Semitic people in general, not an ideology of hating Jews. "Anti-Jewism" is the word for describing people like the Nazis.
true
@@ahaansaccount8422 exactly
You don't define the English language. It now has a meaning referring to jews. By this logic the English language would be reformed completely.
@@dopamine-boost 🤓
@@DanielMemeSmith When you have no arguments.
Phoenicians didn't speak Arabic.
They did.. and Arabic dialect not stadard Arabic, nobody speaks it at home
@@fadyalqaisy Sure. Hahaha. Go get a brain 🧠.
Another comment, do not know but turkey Türkiye uses Roman script for Turkish.
Q. Do they use Roman letters for the Arabic religious scripts IE the Koran?
The Quran is strictly written in Arabic to avoid any manipulation (intentional or otherwise) but the Tafsir (The explanation of Quran) can be written in any other language.
Most Turks have a basic understanding of the Arabic alphabet and how to read the Quran in Arabic but when it comes to the interpretation of the verses Turkish is used.
Phoenician was actually closer to Hebrew than Arabic.
Ah beat me too it
Nope. Unlike Hebrew, Phoenician and Arabic retain the semitic verb to be KN not found in Hebrew. The verb to be is the most used and important verb in any language.
In Tunisia basically we write in social media with latin Alphabet we add numbers to fill the missing letters
Your content is interesting but your delivery is awful. Gabble, gabble, gabble, with no pauses between sentences. It's an unnatural way of speaking that soon becomes annoying. I'm afraid I never got to the end.
hello I would like to know if the Maltese language was already present 2000 years ago at the time of the Roman Empire? Or were the Arabs from the 1500s Saudi Arabian peninsula when they arrived in North Africa who brought the Semitic Maltese language?
The Arabs who conquered Malta and most of the Mediterranean came came from the levant not from the Saudi Peninsula.
In Turkey I saw Spanish written in Arabic script and Hebrew as well, and they called it Ladino.
From what I know there are no clear traces of Phoenician Canaanite in Maltese
A yes, the tiny Island you cannot unify Italy without.
Well, Malta is in the middle between Gibraltar and Suez. No wonder the British kept it as a stronghold for quite a period of time.
Wikipedia says English pronunciation of this country is
/ˈmɒltə/,
A like in FAther. You pronounce it M'lta. Is that the local pronunciation?
Island of Man:
-Hold my beer