69. The Maltese Cart Ruts

The hematologists' Maltese Falcon.

The Knights Templar of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a golden falcon encrusted with jewels. Pirates stole this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery, still invoked by films and novels. Our story begins more than 150 years ago when John Hughes Bennett in Edinburgh and Rudolf Virchow in Berlin described, at autopsies, enlarged spleens in me...

Getting Out of Our Conceptual Ruts

The human tendency to think recurring thoughts limits our theories and research. This article presents four sets of strategies that may be useful for generating new perspectives on familiar research problems: playing with ideas, considering contexts, probing and tinkering with assumptions, and clarifying and systematizing the conceptual frame. In 1879, Sir Francis Galton published an article de...

Characteristics of the Maltese Entrepreneur

This empirical study which is based in Malta seeks to characterize the personality/psychological profile of Maltese entrepreneurs (business owners and self-employed persons) and employed managers. The characteristics investigated in this study are the need for achievement, locus of control, tolerance towards ambiguity, self-confidence, creativity/innovativeness, risk-taking propensity and self-...

The Mélange of Innovation and Tradition in Maltese Law: the Essence of the Maltese

Relativisation in Maltese

This paper provides a comprehensive description of relative clause structures in standard Maltese, which is a mixed language belonging to the South Arabic branch of Central Semitic, with a Maghrebi/Siculo-Arabic stratum, a Romance (Sicilian, Italian) superstratum and an English adstratum. Where relevant, we draw attention to divergences between standard and dialectal Maltese. We provide detaile...