Describing literary Maltese : concordances to Dun Karm and Ruzar Briffa

Abstract

In 2007 Oliver Friggieri published in one volume all the poems written by Dun Karm Psaila, which were previously scattered in various newspapers and rare periodicals. This provided a long-awaited opportunity to study the local variety of Italian belonging to the literary genre and I decided to start with a concordance to Dun Kann's poems. I then thought it worthwhile to compare his lexicon with that of his Maltese poems. Another step was a comparison between Dun Karm's lexical choices and those of another highly-rated Maltese poet, Ruzar Briffa. In this paper I present and compare the results obtained by three students, Catherine Aquilina, Olivia De Brincat and Christian Sciberras who wrote dissertations under my guidance.

L-ewzzjoni tal-poeziji li Dun Karm Psaila kiteb bit-Taljan offriet, fl-2007, opportunitl wisq mistennija biex jigi studjat it-Taljan ta' Malta fil-varjeta letterarja tiegnu u bdejt bi progett biex jinbnew ilkonkordanzi, lista tal-kliem kollu ui:at fdawn il-poeziji. Gietni wkoll il-kurZita biex inqabbel il-kliem uZat mill-istess awtur fil-poezija bit-Taljan mal-kliem uzat fil-poezija bil-Malti. Deherli utli wkoll inqabbel it-tendenzi fl-ghai:la tal-vokabolarju bejn Dun Karm u Ruzar Briffa. Bix-xognol ta' tliet studenti, Catherine Aquilina, Olivia De Brincat, u Christian Sciberras, inkisbu dawn ir-riZultati.