The languages of our dreams

[Gormur]

Probably not even worth mentioning but regina meant queen in Late Latin. The -ion word reminds me of queen bee, which might make sense in a dream

I searched a bit and apparently Old English didn't have princess as a word, so maybe that explains why there's no word for transitioning from princess to queen even though there isn't one for prince to king either

[Linguaphile]

Or enthroned.

True, but that can also be used to refer to non-monarchs and figuratively pretty much anything. Of course any word that explicitly refers to enmonarchment could be, too, but at least it'd literally refer to... uh... enmonarchment. I swear the only word I can think of is *enmonarched, and it is immediately understandable so it would probably be better than something more obscure... but I'm still pretty sure there has to be a word with that explicit specific meaning, even if it'd only be found in some obscure 16th-century dictionary.

(In Ghanaian English they say enstooled.)

Interesting!

The thing is, enmonarched isn't a real word, but enthroned is. There's also coronated and crowned.

[Vlürch]

The thing is, enmonarched isn't a real word, but enthroned is. There's also coronated and crowned.

Yeah, but the creation of neologisms is (increasingly?) one of the ways new words become "real". This one probably wouldn't become widely used in any case since, like you said, those (near-)synonyms exist, though... but it seems too good a word not to use if specificity is needed imho. There is one result on Google for enmonarched, which also uses monarching to mean something like "to do monarchial things", so it's not like I'd be the first person to use it if I used it.

I didn't mean to derail this thread, but...

[Gormur]

It seems kind of useless though when you already have enthroned which can also turn into dethrone(d). It's also easy to pronounce

What does en- mean anyway? It almost seems like something's going on within a monarchy

The enmonarched church where the wedding took place between the king and newly crowned queen was celebrated for its history.

There

[Vlürch]

It seems kind of useless

Well, maybe, but I meant specifically a word that's not used figuratively the same way as enthroned and would only be used to refer to literal monarchs.

[Gormur]

It seems kind of useless

Well, maybe, but I meant specifically a word that's not used figuratively the same way as enthroned and would only be used to refer to literal monarchs.

No idea. I think it has to do with the structure of kings coming first and queens being their wife, so automatically they (women) were royalty but then even as things got more complex with rules they never came up with terms to express what women did in their chosen/inherited roles

I guess you know all that, but in hypothetical terms it'd be interesting to come up with terms. Like what it's called when a daughter becomes queen. We know it's usually because she's the eldest at the time but what would it be called, e.g to inherit a kingdom?

[Linguaphile]

It seems kind of useless

Well, maybe, but I meant specifically a word that's not used figuratively the same way as enthroned and would only be used to refer to literal monarchs.

The literal meaning comes first, and then it acquires figurative meanings by extension. You could invent a word like enmonarched, but if the word caught on (if people started to actually use it), it would almost certainly be only a matter of time before people started using it figuratively as well.

[Gormur]

It's too hard to say, in my opinion

Actually my dream job is to be a person who invents new words for Norwegian and maybe Icelandic. English is a bit trickier because I don't really think that way about it, like I memorized a lot of it as a kid then stuck with it but newer words never stick because I don't already know them. They're counter-intuitive sounding, or maybe because I don't care

[Vlürch]

The literal meaning comes first, and then it acquires figurative meanings by extension. You could invent a word like enmonarched, but if the word caught on (if people started to actually use it), it would almost certainly be only a matter of time before people started using it figuratively as well.

Mmh... weeeeell, true, I can't and don't even want to argue with that. Figurative uses even for words with seemingly strict literal meanings can of course be good, too, etc. It's just weird to me if there really isn't even an obscure (near-)synonym for enthrone(d) that has an etymological connection to monarch, regent, reign or whatever, but then again languages often have weird lexical gaps... just, you know, English being English, I'd always expect a dozen synonyms/near-synonyms to exist for every single concept.

[Gormur]

If there never was one, one could invent a word. There might be a way to do it with Old English but it'd have to be reconstructed since there's no record of this concept

Maybe I misunderstood. Were you trying to come up with a term meaning when a woman becomes queen or was it to do with a kingdom ruled by a woman?

[Vlürch]

Maybe I misunderstood. Were you trying to come up with a term meaning when a woman becomes queen or was it to do with a kingdom ruled by a woman?

Nothing about women, just a word meaning "having become (or been made) a monarch" referring to anyone of any gender derived from some root with a literal etymological connotation of monarchy. I wasn't trying to come up with one but figure out if one already exists. My assumption was that since English has so many obscure words barely anyone even uses, there probably already is one... but I guess there isn't, after all?

[Gormur]

Yeah and even then you need to say having become a royal monarch when there's no context

Bequeathe the throne is an inheritance; the throne was bequethed to them

I can't find one that isn't an idiom

[linguoboy]

One of the last things I looked at before going to bed last night was an analysis of the Vietnamese expression không có chi, which translates "you're welcome". It showed up in my dreams in a rather unexpected way: I was discussing Japanese names for body parts with a friend of a friend and trying to get him to confirm whether chi meant "nape of the neck" or not. (The weird thing was, when he replied to me, he wasn't speaking Japanese but Spanish.)

[linguoboy]

Scottish Gaelic this time. I dreamt that was about to leave on a trip and I was looking through my mother's purchases for some food for the trip when one of the villagers noticed me and turned to another to say, "Give him some ùraidean for the journey. I immediately knew that this meant "new potatoes" (ùr is Scottish Gaelic for "new") and the other villager must have just recently harvested some. Sure enough, she opened her bag and scooped some cooked potato into a little jar for me.

[vijayjohn]

How was the potato cooked? Does ùraidean really mean 'new potato' in Scottish Gaelic?

[Antea]

I my dream I was speaking in French with someone on my phone, but in fact I was in a Spanish restaurant on the road where everybody was speaking very loud. So I had to try very hard to ignore Spanish to continue to speak only in French. And then the person with which I was speaking on the phone asked me if I knew the meaning of a word in French, but in fact the word was in Scottish Gaelic, so I just was trying to guess the meaning trying to relate it to an ancient French word

[Ahendu]

I've been watching Xena the warrior Princess series recently, and watched it this night. On this night I also randomly clicked on "fifth column" Wikipedia article when I got curious about the origin of this expression. I've been studying persian and arabic recently.

So, i had this dream that a village was dominated by other (typical warrior princess series), but they kept angry and to not leave it they started creating symbols with the number 5, to symbolize they were the 5th column, everything in their culture became related to 5. I remember seeing a paper with their numbers, their number system was based on 5, and I heard a number was called khamsa(arabic?), other panj(persian?) something as If 5 was called khamsa, 50 panja and so on, but in a number system based on 5.

[Rí.na.dTeangacha]

I dreamt about kanji, which isn't surprising. But after I woke up, I went back to sleep and had another text-based dream, this time about some unknown language with a script that looked vaguely South East Asian. I and a group of people were evaluating a review of a translation where the reviewer (who seemingly couldn't read the language he was reviewing) marked a section of the text as incorrect due to the script in that section looking strange (by comparison to the rest of the text) - it was much larger and ornate than the surrounding words. I said to the others that that didn't nessesarily disqualify the translation, because I knew that in Arabic for example, they have a single character for Allah which is larger and more ornate than the regular script. I then confirmed this with one of the group who spoke Arabic.

Now that I'm awake and looked it up, I think I was thinking of this: ﷽
According to Reddit, it means "In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful".

[Rí.na.dTeangacha]

I just woke up from a rather disturbing nightmare which featured French, of all things. I was in a creepy old haunted house being tortured, but managed to endear myself to the torturer enough to escape the room, when I suddenly found myself frantically locking myself and my torturer (and some random third person who's now with us because dreams I guess) into a different room to escape another thing that was hunting us. I look through the keyhole and see it's my best friend. The other two in the room with me start screaming that it's not him, it's it and I should under no circumstances open that door. I look again and now it's flitting between various people I know, and of course I decide to let it in because this is a nightmare... A moment later I'm somehow replaying this scene, but from an earlier point, where it (which in my mind I had now characterised as the Devil) was sprinting up the staircase towards the room I was in. I decided this time to open the door and charge at it to try to kill it. In its natural form (before morphing into my friends or family) it is a kind of weird, giant, faceless procelain doll, with a black and blue chess-board checkered design pattern on it and a sort of curly judge's wig on its head. It's slightly hunched over as it runs, almost like it's actually got more than two legs, but I can't clearly see its bottom half in my mind's eye. Anyway, I'm running down the staircase at it, it's running up the staircase at me at about 70km an hour and looks like it has the momemtum of a large truck, but I jump straight at it. During this entire time, there's a voice (the Devil's?) singing the phrase "C'est la haine! C'est la haine!" in an American accent.
The next thing I know, I'm replaying the scene yet again, this time from outside the house as someone else (the torturer? the third person in the room?), and this person is not one of the good guys... She (who I am, in the dream, but it's not me...) realises she can control the Devil somehow, and spread the destruction outside of the house by loudly singing "C'est la haine!", invoking Hell to erupt from cracks beneath the ground radiating out from the house.

And that's when I woke up. One of my more cinematic dreams I'd say, but truely terrifying when I was in it. Sorry for the long (and mostly non-linguistic) description, but I feel better having written it down now.

[vijayjohn]

I'm not sure I fully understand this dream, but no worries!