A comparative study of some semantic differences between Maltese and Koranic Arabic

Abstract

Living languages are constantly changing and developing, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes more rapidly. These changes occur not only in the morphology of the language, although it is here that they are perhaps most noticeable, particularly in the case of those languages which formerly may have had a high degree of inflection, but also in its semantics. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the more interesting and obvious semantic changes which have occurred in Maltese, showing the difference between the meanings of certain equivalent or corresponding words in Arabic and Maltese.