Mikiel Anton Vassalli
| Mikiel Anton Vassalli | |
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| Born | Mikiel Anton Vassalli 5 March 1764 Żebbuġ, Malta |
| Died | January 12, 1829 Malta |
| Occupation | lexicographer, writer, freedom fighter |
| Nationality | Maltese |
Mikiel Anton Vassalli (March 5, 1764 in Żebbuġ, Malta – January 12, 1829) was a Maltese writer, a philosopher, and a linguist who published important Maltese language books, including a Maltese-Italian dictionary, a Maltese grammar book, the first Protestant Gospels in Maltese, and towards the end of his life, a book on Maltese proverbs.
Mikiel Anton Vassalli was born in Żebbuġ in 1764 to a peasant family, and lost his father at the age of two. In 1785, at the age of 21, he started studies of oriental languages in the Sapienza University of Rome. During his 2nd exile in France he married Catherine Formosa de Freamaux in 1813.
He died in 1829 and, having been refused burial by the Catholic Church. Vassalli was buried in the Msida Bastions Garden of Rest, a Protestant cemetery mainly used by the British.
Maltese grammars and dictionaries had already been written before the century, but all of them have long since been lost. It is for this reason that the honour of being the author of the first grammar goes to Canon Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis for his Della lingua púnica presentemente usata da Maltesi in Roma (1750). It was only in the 1790s that Vassalli, alone among Maltese nationalists, took an interest in purifying the language of Italianisms and reviving it as a national language.
During the nineties Vassalli published three substantial works about the Maltese language, which set the study of the Maltese language for the first time on solid and scientific foundations. These works were:
The introduction to the dictionary has a strong social and political flavour which makes it very clear that Vassalli's primary aim was not the Maltese language in itself, but the civil and moral education of the Maltese people which he believed could only be attained through their native language. One can easily point out Vassalli's Discorso Preliminare as second only to the Constitution of the Republic in that it is a beautiful and precious document for the Maltese Nation to whom it was dedicated with the words: "Alla Nazione Maltese", a phrase which in those days could only be the fruits of a very fertile imagination.
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