The culprit? ENCODINGS, or lack thereof. This may seem to be an overly technical subject, however please read on, because this is at the core of whether Maltese is to be treated as a first class language in its own right, or allowed to barely scrape along and subjected to a hotchpotch array of "hacks" which will produce inferior results in the end.
For example, usually the letter 'A' is represented by the number 65. So, to make the word 'JAM', there would be in the computer's memory "74, 65, 77".
As humans, however, we don't want to be told that we have an email from the "66, 111, 115, 115", we would like to see the letters in their familiar shapes ("Boss"). This, then, is the role of a font. A font is a collection of pictures arranged by number, kind of a gallery from which one can order based on code number. When it is time to display on the computer screen, or on paper, the font is asked one by one for each image.
However, and this is a critical point, the computer does not work with the image of the letters, other than when it is time to display. For example, if one emails the word "JAM" to an associate, only the numbers: 74, 65, 77, are sent. For them to see 'JAM', they must be using a computer system and font which will display J for 74, and so on.
In order to work with Maltese on the computer, past solutions have focused on the shape of the letters stored in a font. For example, one popular system changes the shape of character #125, the right curly brace "}", to the Maltese uppercase cut H.
When using this font, pressing the "}" key would be still interpreted to the computer as being character number #125, which is considered as a curly brace. However, what you see on the screen will look like a Maltese cut H.
Even though this method does allow the use of Maltese, some shortcomings can be easily shown. For example, let us return to the example of sending an email. Suppose you have the word 'HAJ' in Maltese.
If your associate is not using the same FONT, they will see "}AJ" (see figure encoding01) because 125 is the standard code for a right curly brace. Actually, in another font system, character #125 is actually dotted-Z (Zed bit-tikka)- so you will see zed bit-tikka instead of cut h! As well, the right curly brace "}" cannot be typed with this font.
To solve this sort of problem, a system called Unicode (X'inhu l-Unicode? [Malti] * What is Unicode? [English] ) was developed about a decade ago. Related to the standard ISO-10646, it assigns a unique number to every different character of every language. All of the letters needed for Maltese have been present from the beginning. Here is a very small piece of the Unicode standard- as of this writing, there are over 94,000 characters which have been assigned numbers.
[ Picture: encoding04.gif:
A #65
} #125
cut-H #294
Russian Zhe #1046
.. and so on ]
Using such a system, there is never any confusion between letters. A Maltese cut-H is always a Maltese cut-H, number #294. It is still required to have a font with any characters to be shown, but many fonts already contain the Maltese characters. Therefore, different fonts can be chosen for different styles of lettering, without being restricted to only those fonts which are specifically Maltese.
There is then a Huge difference between using an encoding which supports Maltese, and simply "having a font with Maltese letters". Yes, the end result is that you see letters in Maltese. But that is not the entire story. Consider the example given above with 'tieghi' turning into 'tiegh I'. What happened there? In some systems, the Maltese letter 'h' for example shows up when you press the key '['. However, the computer still thinks it is a left square bracket, '['. This is because changing the font only changes how the '[' is displayed, so that it looks like a Maltese letter. So we have: tieg[i. The computer sees the 'i' all by itself, and assumes you meant to type the English word for myself! So to be helpful, it capitalises the I and inserts a space.
You will see that the Maltese 'h' can take on the codes 5d, c9, 0127, B1, 9c, or 5b, and many others depending on which system and font you are using. X'thawwid!
Most software today is oriented towards English and its 26-letter alphabet, with a fair amount of support for "Western European" characters (i.e. ISO 8859-1, Latin-1). The Maltese alphabet requires the characters: c. (C Dot), g. (G Dot), h/ (H Cross), and z. (Z Dot). All of these have upper and lowercase variations. - 8 characters in total. In addition, għ and ie are digraphs.