A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

principle of vowel length seems to dictate the orthography. So we instead get kantajnihulek and
ftaħnihulek as correct forms.
B.3.2
Vowel length and negation
Consider the verbs waqaf (‘he stopped’), kiel (‘he ate’), and ħa (‘he took’). #Note that the latter
two are irregular, however I think they are still valid for the point I want to make. Their imperfect
forms all consist of a stem containing the long vowel ie: jieqaf, jiekol, and jieħu respectively.
Negation of the Maltese verb, which involves the suffixation of -x, tends to move emphasis of
towards the end of the word and means that any long vowel ie must change into a shorter i or
e (Azzopardi, 2007, p. 92). This yields the forms jiqafx, jikolx and jiħux for P3 Sg Masc and jiqfu,
jiklux and jiħdux for P3 Pl.
A small frequency analysis in the corpus highlights an interesting pattern. Table B.3 shows
the frequency of each variant spelling as a percentage of the number of occurrences of the positive
form (for which there is no variation in spelling).
Table B.3: Corpus study of vowel length changes under negation
P3 Sg Masc Pos. Neg. ie Neg. i P3 Pl Pos. Neg. ie Neg. i
jieqaf 3.76% 4.66% jieqfu 3.45% 3.18%
jiekol 1.44% 1.83% jieklu 1.48% 1.28%
jieħu 0.48% 0.73% jieħdu 0.41% 0.42%
What there numbers show is that when considering the singular negative, the version without
the long ie vowel is more common in all cases. For example, jikolx is more common than jiekolx
— as the rule dictates. For plural negatives however, it’s almost the complete opposite. Put
simply, jieklux is slightly more frequent than jiklux, although admittedly the difference in frequency
is less pronounced: 7% in the plural compared to 12% in the singular, for the given
example.
In conclusion, it seems that the rules in grammar books do not always agree with the frequency
results from the corpus. This is perhaps not surprising, but it does go to show that
statistical majority in the corpus does not necessarily aligned with correctness.
83