Assyriana

Ignoraba la existencia de un campo disciplinario autónomo dedicado al estudio de la historia y cultura de la antigua mesopotamia. Como es conocido ya en el caso de la egiptología, arqueología y filología se conjugan nuevamente para dar nacimiento a la asiriología. Me declaro culpable de no haberla oído nunca nombrar.
Interesante los desafíos para el estudioso

As an academic discipline, Assyriology presents itself as one of the most demanding fields in the humanities. Scholars need a good knowledge of several Semitic languages (including Akkadian and its major dialects, aided by such languages as Biblical Hebrew for comparative purposes), and the capacity to absorb the complexities of writing systems with several hundred core signs. While there now exist many important grammatical studies and lexical aids, many texts remain difficult to interpret accurately. Frequently, this is because the tablets they were written on are broken, or in the case of literary texts, where there may be many copies, the language and grammar are arcane. Moreover, scholars must be able to read and understand modern English, French, and German, as important references, dictionaries, and journals are published in those languages.

Explorando páginas cercanas, debo decir que fue alta la sorpresa de enterarme que los malteses hablan un idioma semítico y no latino como creía (aunque escrito en alfabeto latino).
No obstante el origen árabe, el vocabulario se nutre principalmente de palabras latinas:

Vocabulary

Maltese vocabulary is a hybrid based on a foundation of Arabic Semitic roots with a heavy borrowing of Sicilian, Italian, and English loanwords. Its vocabulary consists of 52% Italian and Sicilian, 32% Arabic, and 6% English, with some of the remainder being French.^[3][11] In this respect it is similar to English (a Germanic language heavily influenced by Norman French). The result of this highly uneven distribution of loanwords throughout the language is that a speaker of the loanword-source language (in this case Romance or English language speakers) can find a number of familiar words in, for instance, the main page of the Maltese Wikipedia or comprehend the subject of a newspaper article, but cannot understand even such basic Maltese sentences such as Ir-raġel qiegħed fid-dar (The man is in the house). This situation resembles that of a monolingual English speaker, who will often be able to guess the content of something in French if it is formal academic writing, but not understand much simpler sentences.

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,^[3] although another source claims 40%.^[12] These are generally more 'learned' words, having to do with new ideas, objects, government, law, education, art, literature, and general learning. They are mostly derived from Sicilian and thus exhibit Sicilian phonetic characteristics, such as /u/ in place of /o/ and /i/ in place of /e/ (e.g. tiatru not teatro and fidi not fede). Also, as with Old Sicilian, /ʃ/ (English 'sh') is written 'x' and this produces spellings such as: ambaxxata /ambaʃːaːta/ ('embassy'), xena /ʃeːna/ ('scene' cf. Italian ambasciata, scena)

Por último como yapa, policía en árabe se dice شرطة (shurta). Ya sabemos ahora de donde debe provenir eso de yuta.