The Sicilian element in Maltese

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the Romance lexical element borrowed into Maltese from Sicilian. I have included a good number of archaic and even of obsolete or obsolescent words, most of which are now utterly unknown to the inhabitants, and which are only found in manuscript notes and/or unpublished dictionaries, and I have analysed these terms both phonetically and semantically, showing their development in Maltese and their divergence from their Sicilian model. The purpose of this glossary is not to study the etymology of the Romance words in Maltese, but to find the Sicilian word from which the Maltese term was borrowed; other Italian dialects, chiefly Calabrian, Neapolitan, Genoese and Venetian, besides Old and Modern Italian, are quoted to show their influence on the phonetic and semantic development of the Maltese language. This glossary should form the basis of any ulterior analysis of the phonetic features of the older element of Romance Maltese, and for the classification of its patterns and semantic developments; this research is, therefore, a contribution to the study of Romance Philology, especially as it shows the development of Romance phonemes in Maltese, a language whose phonological and morphological structure is fundamentally Arabic. Besides, this thesis should shed some light on the phonological characteristics of Sicilian as it was spoken in the late Middle Ages, when presumably the greater number of Sicilian loanwords passed into Maltese, especially as some of the phonetic features and semantic developments and even sometimes the words themselves have been lost in Modern Sicilian and a few have left no trace at all, not even in Old Sicilian.