On Aug 28, 2004, at 8:31 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
These titles are Italian, sort of,
Looks Sicilian to me. Sort of.
Keith, you mentioned a "Maltese community", but that's less specific than you might think.
Historically, Malta has passed through a variety of owners, roughly: Byzantine, Arab, Sicilian, Spanish, Knights of St John, British, independent. For the main population, the Arab element is what persisted culturally and linguistically (ethnically I assume it's a hodgepodge), with the subsequent rulers as feudal landlords, more or less. The Sicilian kingdom was multiethnic in its early years but gradually became Italianized; the Spanish tradition comes from the side with the Mediterranean maritime empire, which was more Italian-like than the Castilian tradition that eventually dominated Spain; and the Knights were predominantly Italian.
The Maltese language is essentially an offshoot of Arabic, but in a Latin script and heavily influenced by Italian and the others. None of the text you've offered is Maltese. If it were, you'd know it, because it looks very non-Romance. For most of Malta's history, Maltese was the vernacular and the upper class used a language which was a variation of Italian.
My guess is the latter is what you're looking at, and your Maltese community is some remnant of the quasi-Italian landowning class which persisted under British but was eventually squeezed out by the movements of independence and political reform.
mdl
P.S. The information offered here is oversimplified and largely from memory, so take it with a grain of salt.
P.P.S. I assume "souna" is a typo.
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