Joseph M. Brincat
Joseph M. Brincat (signs Giuseppe when writing in Italian) is Full Professor at the University of Malta where he teaches Italian Linguistics. He holds degrees from the universities of Malta, London and Florence, has read papers in conferences held in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, the USA, France, Spain and Lithuania, and has delivered courses and seminars in various universities. His main publications are Giovan Matteo di Meglio, Rime, Olschki, Firenze 1977, La linguistica prestrutturale, Zanichelli, Bologna 1986, Maltese and other languages, Midsea Books, Malta 2011. He has edited the proceedings of six conferences organized in Malta and abroad, and is on the editorial board of various foreign journals. He is an elected member of the Accademia della Crusca (Florence), of the Centro Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani (Palermo), the Centro Internazionale sul Plurilinguismo (Udine), and has been honoured with the title of Commendatore dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana for scientific merits. He is currently collaborating on three large-scale research projects: the Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo (Accademia della Crusca), the Atlante Linguistico del Mediterraneo (Palermo) and the Archivio Testuale del Siciliano Antico (Catania).
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The language spoken by the neolithic Temple builders is not known because they left no writing, but it could have been a "Mediterranean" variety (Gimbutas, Mallory) or an Indo-European dialect (Renfrew).
The earliest surviving inscriptions were in Phoenician, and later ones are in Greek and Latin, but these only attest the high language. There is no evidence of what the islanders spoke up to 870. The fact that there is no Phoenician, Latin or Greek substrate in present-day Maltese proves that the Muslim takeover and introduction of the Magrebin variety, that was also spoken in large parts of Sicily, was sudden and total because when there is a period of bilingualism a good number of words of the previously spoken language always survive in the new one.
The language spoken by the neolithic Temple builders is not known because they left no writing, but it could have been a "Mediterranean" variety (Gimbutas, Mallory) or an Indo-European dialect (Renfrew).
The earliest surviving inscriptions were in Phoenician, and later ones are in Greek and Latin, but these only attest the high language. There is no evidence of what the islanders spoke up to 870. The fact that there is no Phoenician, Latin or Greek substrate in present-day Maltese proves that the Muslim takeover and introduction of the Magrebin variety, that was also spoken in large parts of Sicily, was sudden and total because when there is a period of bilingualism a good number of words of the previously spoken language always survive in the new one.