Feast of St Joseph. Celebrated not as J's name day but because it's a national holiday in Malta. As with Sundays, stores and supermarkets are closed. The construction workers opposite our building are silent.
Maltese is an interesting language, and we're not very good at it. It has early Semitic origins and is related to Phoenician. There are similarities to Arabic, which isn.'t surprising - we're not far off the coast of Tunisia. We pass a church called Marija omm Allah, easily recognisable as Mary, Mother of God. (Traditionally women are known as mother -"um" - followed by the name of the eldest son). Some words in Maltese are similar to Italian, again unsurprisingly as we're just off Sicily. Pronunciation is a challenge as well. G with a dot over it is soft, like the g in magic. C with a dot pronounced like ch in church. But odder things - gh, at the beginning of a word at least, not pronounced at all. X seems to have a sh sound. Judging by the announcements on the buses (pre-recorded and synchronized with the electronic ticker of information at the front of the interior re coming stops) the stresses are quite different from those in English. Words sound almost unrecognisably abrupt.
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