Bilingual Chimerism

A brief examination of a cross-lingual sentence

[Created with Midjourney]

I was reading a book on a hotel couch, enjoying some down-time during a family vacation, when I heard the faint sound of my mom calling out to my sister. She was sitting next to me, and appeared not to have heard her. Turning my head towards her slightly, but keeping my eyes on the page, I said the words:

Mama’s nadeelinglek

I was immediately struck by the peculiarity of this sentence, which I had never uttered before in my life. What monstrous concoction had I just created, what bilingual bastard child had just been born from my mouth?

Looking back, I can recognize several factors that lead to this strange linguistic specimen: my exhaustion from the day’s activities, the division of my attention, and the diglossia of our surrounding environment.

But exploring these factors wouldn’t be half as interesting as exploring their product, this chimeric formulation which, as we’ll soon read, was not entirely haphazard, but seemed to follow its own internal logic.

First, we note that the sentence consists of a regular succession of languages, giving it the structure of a palindrome: Arabic-English-Arabic-English-Arabic. We can visualize this as a superposition of the equivalent English and Arabic…