Asiamano

Asiamano (Asijamano) is a constructed language prominent in Italy, Malta, and Slovenia, while also serving as an unofficial language of the European Union. Maltese is descended from the Italian language. About 25% of the vocabulary is Italian loanwords, while the other 75% is a mixture of Maltese and Slovene vocabulary with occasional borrowings from other Indo-European languages. It is written using the Latin script, and is unique among Italic languages for having five major cases and a dual number (an attribute inherited from Slovene), and has the infinite fourth person (not inherited from any language). Otherwise, the grammar is based on Italian grammar and syntax.


 * NOTE TO READERS: CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION. I LIKED THE WAY THE ARTICLE ON MALTESE WAS WRITTEN ON WIKIPEDIA SO I AM COPYING THE FORMAT, SO THERE IS INFORMATION ABOUT MALTESE ON HERE. IGNORE IT, IT WILL EVENTUALLY GO AWAY.*

Demographics
As of the current era, there are an estimated 75,000 native Asiamano speakers, of whom 70,000 currently reside in Malta, Slovenia, and Italy. Most of the native speakers reside in Ljubljana and Valletta, and are children of the first students of the language. The Slovenian native speakers of Asiamano are natively bilingual in both Asiamano and Slovene, while the Maltese native speakers are natively trilingual in Maltese, English, and Asiamano, and usually speak fluent Italian as a second language. There are small pockets of Asiamano speakers in Naples, Palermo, and Venice (it is a recognized language in the latter two cities). Around 5,000 of the native speakers live outside of those three countries, primarily southern France and Switzerland.

Classification
Asiamano is a Romance language descended from modern Italian, but has extreme influences by Maltese and Slovene. Today, the core vocabulary is a mixture of all three languages, roughly 25% Italian, 30% Maltese, 30% Slovene, and 15% other languages. Asiamano does not have any native words other than slang, and depends on other languages for new vocabulary.

Phonology
Although Slovene has a large vowel system, Asiamano has only one phonemic value per vowel, so the pronunciation of Slovene words do change. Maltese's /ɐ/ shifts to an Italian /a/.

Diphthongs
/ɐʊ, ɐɪ, ɛʊ, ɛɪ, ɪʊ, ɔɪ, ɔʊ/ /a3 ac ec oI ou uI ja je jc jo ju wa we wi wo wc/

Stress
Stress is strictly on the penultimate syllable, unless if the grave accent (on à è ì ò ù) or circumflex (on ô) is added.

Alphabet
The Asiamano alphabet is based on the Italian alphabet. It was the only orthographic system ever used for the language. Below is the Asiamano alphabet, with IPA symbols.

The grave accent can be seen on stressed vowels (à, è, ì, ò, ù) outside of the normal stress position. The circumflex (a orthographic combination of the acute and grave accents) is seen on a stressed version of ó (ô). These are mainly seen in Italian loanwords, like università (university).

Vocabulary
Although the original vocabulary of the language was Siculo-Arabic, it has incorporated a large number of borrowings from Romance sources of influence (Sicilian, Italian, and French), and more recently Germanic ones (from English).

This language is unique in that it lacks any native words, it is made completely of loanwords

The historical source of modern Maltese vocabulary is 52% Italian/Sicilian, 32% Siculo-Arabic, and 6% English, with some of the remainder being French. Today, most function words are Semitic. In this way, it is similar to English, which is a Germanic language that had large influence from French—although less so than Maltese. As a result of this, Romance language-speakers may easily be able to comprehend more complex ideas expressed in Maltese, such as "Ġeografikament, l-Ewropa hi parti tas-superkontinent ta' l-Ewrasja" (Geographically, Europe is part of the Supercontinent of Eurasia), while not understanding a single word of a simple sentence such as "Ir-raġel qiegħed fid-dar" (The man is in the house), which would be easily understood by any Arabic speaker.

Romance
An analysis of the etymology of the 41,000 words in Aquilina's Maltese-English Dictionary shows that words of Romance origin make up 52% of the Maltese vocabulary, although other sources claim from as low as 40%, to as high as 55%. These vocabularies tend to deal with more complicated concepts. They are mostly derived from Sicilian and thus exhibit Sicilian phonetic characteristics, such as in place of, and  in place of  (e.g. tiatru not teatro and fidi not fede). Also, as with Old Sicilian, (English 'sh') is written 'x' and this produces spellings such as: ambaxxata  ('embassy'), xena  ('scene' cf. Italian ambasciata, scena).

A tendency in modern Maltese is to adopt further influences from English and Italian. Complex Latinate English words adopted into Maltese are often given Italianate or Sicilianate forms, even if the resulting words do not appear in either of those languages. For instance, the words "evaluation", "industrial action", and "chemical armaments" become "evalwazzjoni", "azzjoni industrjali", and "armamenti kimiċi" in Maltese, while the Italian terms are valutazione, vertenza sindacale, and armi chimiche respectively. English words of Germanic origin are generally preserved relatively unchanged.

Siculo-Arabic
Siculo-Arabic is the ancestor of the Maltese language, and supplies between 32% and 40% of the language's vocabulary.

found that 40% of a sample of 1,820 Quranic Arabic roots were found in Maltese, a lower percentage than found in Moroccan (58%) and Lebanese Arabic (72%). An analysis of the etymology of the 41,000 words in Aquilina's Maltese-English Dictionary shows that 32% of the Maltese vocabulary is of Arabic origin, although another source claims 40%. Usually, words expressing basic concepts and ideas, such as raġel (man), mara (woman), tifel (boy), dar (house), xemx (sun), sajf (summer), are of Arabic origin. Moreover, belles lettres in Maltese tend to aim mainly at diction belonging to this group.

The Maltese language has merged many of the original Arabic consonants, in particular the emphatic consonants, with others that are common in European languages. Thus, original Arabic, , and all merged into Maltese. The vowels, however, separated from the three in Arabic to five, as is more typical of other European languages. Some unstressed short vowels have been elided. The common Arabic greeting as salāmu 'alaykum is cognate with is-sliem għalikom in Maltese (lit. the peace for you, peace be with you), as are similar greetings in other Semitic languages (e.g. shalom ʿalekhem in Hebrew).

Since the attested vocabulary of Siculo-Arabic is limited, the following table compares cognates in Maltese and some other varieties of Arabic (all forms are written phonetically, as in the source):

English
It is estimated that English loanwords, which are becoming more commonplace, make up 20% of the Maltese vocabulary, although other sources claim amounts as low as 6%. This percentage discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of new English loanwords are sometimes not officially considered part of the Maltese vocabulary; hence, they are not included in certain dictionaries. Also, English loanwards of Latinate origin are very often italianised, as discussed above. English loanwords are generally transliterated, although standard English pronunciation is virtually always retained. Below are a few examples:

Note "fridge", which is a slang term derived from "refrigerator", a Latinate word which might be expected to be rendered as rifriġeratori (Italian uses a different word: frigorifero).

Grammar
Maltese grammar is fundamentally derived from Siculo-Arabic, although Romance and English noun pluralization patterns are also used on borrowed words.

Adjectives and adverbs
Adjectives follow nouns. There are no separately formed native adverbs, and word order is fairly flexible. Both nouns and adjectives of Semitic origin take the definite article (for example, It-tifel il-kbir, lit. "The boy the elder"="The elder boy"). This rule does not apply to adjectives of Romance origin.

Nouns
Nouns are pluralized and also have a dual marker. Semitic plurals are complex; if they are regular, they are marked by -iet/-ijiet, e.g., art, artijiet "lands (territorial possessions or property)" (cf. Arabic -at and Hebrew -ot/-oth) or -in (cf. Arabic -īn and Hebrew -im). If irregular, they fall in the pluralis fractus category, in which a word is pluralized by internal vowel changes: ktieb, kotba "books", raġel, irġiel "man", "men".

Words of Romance origin are usually pluralized in two manners: addition of -i or -jiet. For example, lingwa, lingwi "languages", from Sicilian lingua, lingui.

Words of English origin are pluralized by adding either an "-s" or "-jiet", for example, friġġ, friġis from the word fridge. Some words can be pluralized with either of the suffixes to denote the plural. A few words borrowed from English can amalgamate both suffixes, like brikksa from the English brick, which can adopt either collective form brikks or the plural form brikksiet.

Article
The proclitic il- is the definite article, equivalent to "the" in English.

The Maltese article becomes l- before or after a vowel.
 * l-omm (the mother)
 * rajna l-Papa (we saw the Pope)
 * il-missier (the father)

The Maltese article assimilates to a following coronal consonant (called konsonanti xemxin "sun consonants"), namely:
 * Ċ iċ-ċikkulata (the chocolate)
 * D id-dar (the house)
 * N in-nar (the fire)
 * R ir-razzett (the farm)
 * S is-serrieq (the saw)
 * T it-tifel (the boy)
 * X ix-xemx (the sun)
 * Ż iż-żarbun (the shoe)
 * Z iz-zalzett (the sausage)

Maltese il- is coincidentally identical in pronunciation to the one of the Italian masculine articles, il, which is also l’ before, but not after, a vowel. Consequently, many nouns borrowed from Standard Italian did not change their original article when used in Maltese. Romance vocabulary taken from Sicilian did change where the Sicilian articles u and a, before a consonant, are used.

Verbs
Verbs show a triliteral Semitic pattern, in which a verb is conjugated with prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (for example ktibna, Arabic katabna, Hebrew kathabhnu (Modern Hebrew: katavnu) "we wrote"). There are two tenses: present and perfect. The Maltese verb system incorporates Romance verbs and adds Maltese suffixes and prefixes to them (for example, iddeċidejna "we decided" ← (i)ddeċieda "decide", a Romance verb + -ejna, a Maltese first person plural perfect marker).

Dialects
Urban varieties of Maltese are closer to Standard Maltese than rural varieties, which have some characteristics that distinguish them from Standard Maltese. They tend to show some archaic features such as the realization of kh and gh and the imala of Arabic ā into ē (or ī especially in Gozo)-considered archaic because they are reminiscent of 15th century transcriptions of this sound. Another archaic feature is the realization of Standard Maltese ā as ō in rural dialects. There is also a tendency to diphthongize simple vowels, e.g., ū becomes eo or eu. Rural dialects also tend to employ more Semitic roots and broken plurals than Standard Maltese. In general, rural Maltese is less distant from its Siculo-Arabic ancestor than Standard Maltese.

Media
With Malta being a multilingual country, the usage of Maltese in the mass media is shared with other European languages, namely English and Italian. The majority of television stations broadcast from Malta are in English or Maltese, although broadcasts from Italy in Italian are also received on the islands. Similarly, there are more Maltese-language radio programs than English ones broadcast from Malta, but again, as with television, Italian broadcasts are also picked up. Maltese generally receives equal usage in newspaper periodicals to English.

The use of the Maltese language on the Internet is not altogether common, and the number of websites written in Maltese are few. In a survey of Maltese cultural websites conducted in 2004 on behalf of the Maltese Government, 12 of 13 were in English only, while the remaining one was multilingual but did not include Maltese.

Code-switching
The Maltese population, being fluent in both Maltese and English, displays code-switching (referred to as Maltenglish) in certain localities and between certain social groups.