The attack of the Mulla-Walla….

“Look! Is that a Mulla-Walla” Jill excitedly enquired as we were strolling through the Al-Rashid Mall the other day. This took me by a complete surprise as I would never have expected to see a member of Australian marsupial species wandering about your typical middle-eastern shopping mall.

”Er,, what exactly you mean?” I asked.

“You know, the Mwafti, Is that a Mwafti?

This had me completely baffled now. From what sounded like a distinctly Australian fauna had now evolved into and African sounding species. Having quickly scanned the mall for anything that resembled marsupials, vermin, feral cats, exotic lizards and the like I was still at a complete loss as to what exactly was being referred to here.

At that exact moment I also happened to spot a couple of local Muttawa (religious police) hassling some boys about whatever it is that Muttawa hassle local boys about. I had a suspicious thought that perhaps this may be what Jill had on her mind.

Do you mean those Muttawa’s, I asked her. “That’s it, that’s what I meant, the Myutawa”.

All was clarified in an instant of course. Upon reflecting back it is obviously an easy mistake to make. Word jumbling happens to the best of us and Arabic of course is a positively a linguistic mine-field for us, the speakers of that distinct Australian native dialect called Bogan-Bogan which survives (and is indeed prospering) in the outer reaches of Australias major cities.

After all, Mulla-Walla, Mwafti, Myutawa, and Muttawa are technically almost indistinguishable from each other. They all contain letters M, W, U and A

Here is a quick if somewhat dodgy attempt at scientific explanation based on a very loose approach to statistics

	Length	M	W	U	A	Total	%
Mulla Walla	10	1	1	1	3	6	60%
Mwafti	6	1	1		1	3	50%
Myutawa	7	1	1	1	2	5	71%
Muttawa	7	1	1	1	2	5	71%

As you can see from the above the occurrence of the common letters is between 50 and 70 % so really it is a very easy mistake to make J

Posted by Jesse from Jill’s account :)