AUXILIARY VOWELS IN WORD MEDIAL CONS ONANT CLUSTE R S IN THE HISTORY OF M ALTESE

Borg (1978) notes that 15th and 16th-century transcriptions of Maltese place names display the auxiliary vowels [a] or [i] inserted into word-medial consonant clusters. According to Borg (1978) the quality of the auxiliary vowel is phonologically conditioned: it is [a] in a back environment, but [i] elsewhere. On this analysis the auxiliary vowels [a] and [i] exhibit complementary distribution. The examination of records of Maltese, however, yields a more complex picture. Auxiliary vowels continue to occur relatively frequently in the 17th-century, as evidenced by archival records of the Roman Inquisition (Cassar 2005), Thezan’s (by 1647) dictionary, the place names in Abela (1647), and Skippon’s (1732) word list collected in 1664. On the strength of the evidence provided by 17th-century records, it is shown that: (i) Maltese resorted to three auxiliary vowels – [a], [ɪ] and [o]; (ii) phonological conditioning is less strict than hitherto assumed, with [ɪɪ] occasionally occurring in a back environment as well; (iii) left-to-right vowel copying also plays a role in determining the quality of the auxiliary vowel, whereby an /o/ preceding a back consonant determines the selection of [o]. Also, it is shown that the findings are compatible with the hypothesis of a direct link between Sicilian Arabic and Maltese.