A social and historical commentary on 'the dialogues' of De Soldanis

Abstract

The article talks about the works of Giovanni Pietro Francesco Aguis de Soldanis, commonly known as De Soldanis. The author gives a social and a historical commentary on his works, specifically, the Dialogues. The Dialogues may be regarded as being of vital importance for several reasons, some of them linguistic, some of them socio-historical. From a linguistic point of view, the Dialogues are one of the earliest examples of Maltese prose writing. Also from a linguistic point of view, the importance of the Dialogues lies in their being written in idiomatic Maltese (although they had an Italian translation beside them), thus throwing valuable light on the way in which Maltese was spoken in the middle of the eighteenth century: because spoken languages are constantly changing, the Dialogues thus give a first-hand picture of the language of an earlier age.