essays on de soldanis

ESSAYS ON DE SOLDANIS
agevolezza l’Idioma Punico Maltese ito ormai in dimenticanza.’
As regards the ‘Vocabolario’ appended to the work he
commented as follows: ‘Al dizzionario però bisognarebbe che
fosse più copioso per aggevolare li curiosi di detto Idioma.’ 59
Rather surprisingly, de Soldanis states in a letter dated
22 April 1753 that he was all the more encouraged to revise
and enlarge his two dissertations published in Rome in
1750 because he had been informed from Florence that
they were being translated into English with a view to
publication in that language. This information is contained
in a manuscript letter belonging to Prof. Alain Blondy,
of Sorbonne, who very kindly copied it to Canon John
Azzopardi, of the Cathedral Museum, Mdina, for eventual
use by researchers. 60 The relevant extract from the letter,
addressed to a correspondent who has not been identified
so far, reads as follows:
Vò proseguendo per ora la fatica de’ due lessici promessi, ed ho
di molto accresciuto quelle due dissertazioni pubblicati in Roma
l’anno 1750 sulla nostra lingua, incoragito a questa intrapresa,
perche sento da Firenze, che si va traducendo in Inglese per
imprimere in quell’idioma quel mio picciol trattatello.
Dissenting voices, however, were not lacking. To give
one example, Bartolomeo Mifsud (1708-1781), better known
as the Capuchin Padre Pelagio, of Żebbuġ, was a learned
scholar who pointed out certain shortcomings in de
Soldanis’ grammar and criticised him for not consulting his
friends before he formed his alphabet. He himself devised
a Punico-Maltese alphabet, which bears a lengthy title
Alfabeto Punico-Maltese con che facilissimamente da chichesia
s’apprende il vero e proprio metodo di parlare, di scrivere e di
leggere nell’idioma Maltese, servendosi delle lettere dell’alfabeto
59 NLM Libr. 146 ii, f. 106r.
60 See Blondy, 71-80, in the present volume.
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