The languages of our dreams

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-11-13, 13:16

Just a little while ago, I had a dream that ended with me walking down a street with a (real-life) Czech co-worker of mine and I think a little girl who was supposed to be her daughter? (I have no idea whether she has a daughter IRL or not :lol:). Both of them were singing "Ja sam sirota" while walking along because in my dream, I had somehow managed to confuse Serbo-Croatian with Czech and Slovak. :rotfl: I think this is partly because of some similarities between Serbo-Croatian and Slovak but mostly just because Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible and so are Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (and this particular song is a folk song that seems to be commonly sung throughout the Serbo-Croatian-speaking region. I posted a version of it once before on the BCS songs thread). Anyway, I tried to join in because I happen to sort of know this song. (I'll be fucked if I can sing any actual songs in Czech).

Suddenly, my Czech co-worker stopped and tried to test my Czech comprehension by saying something in Czech and pointing to this part of the sidewalk. The sidewalk was divided up into these square-shaped steps, and she was pointing to the step right in front of us. I couldn't really make out her exact words, but based on what I know of other Slavic languages, I understood, "Dear comrade, :?: :!: please proceed onto this step!" I replied with može because I didn't know how to say 'okay' in Czech, so I just used Serbo-Croatian instead hoping that she'd get the idea, and then my alarm went off because I have to go to work on Sundays. :P Then I was suddenly like fuck, I do know how to say 'okay' in Czech! It's dobře! :lol:

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby lähettiläs » 2016-11-15, 17:15

I dreamed in Hebrew for a month and learned it.
[flag=]fi[/flag] Finnish is an indoeuropean language

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2016-11-22, 16:53

I dreamt of an island in Arctic Ocean near Russia about the size of Wrangell Island. One half was occupied by Russia and had been Russified but the other had been colonised by Portugal and the main vernacular was still an indigenous Uralic language. I remember very little about it except that it had a small vowel inventory with complex allophony (something like you find in many Oceanic languages) and that the locative suffix--something like /jant͡s/ or /jat͡s/--occurred in nearly all place names.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Meera » 2016-11-22, 19:19

I had a dream in French the other night, I have no idea why :P
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby OldBoring » 2016-12-25, 5:35

My dreams have no languages. Probably these days I nearly never talk to anyone.

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-04, 17:16

I dreamt that I saw an add for a newish line of self-instruction books and I was kicking myself for not picking up the Tatar volume when I'd had the chance. I was bummed to wake up and realise this was not a real thing.

I also spoke a little German to someone who identified himself as coming from "the Sweden of Germany". I was dying to find out where he thought that was, but I got distracted.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-05, 3:46

linguoboy wrote:I also spoke a little German to someone who identified himself as coming from "the Sweden of Germany". I was dying to find out where he thought that was, but I got distracted.

I googled "the Sweden of Germany" and found only one result: this comic, with this remark by the (apparently northern German) person who drew it somewhere below it in the comments:
But germany (especially the North of germany) has a very similar mentality like Scandinavia. [...] The stereotypical attribute of germany is also beer, not sausages (sausages belongs to Bavaria and Austria... Well, Bavaria is a part of germany, but every german hates Bavarian. Bavarian is the sweden of germany and it has the same mentality like austria and switzerland - while the North mentality is similar to netherlands and denmark. )

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-13, 18:02

Long convoluted dreams last night. One involved some project to have displaced youth clean up a polluted pond or something. They were of Eastern European origin; at first I thought they were Slavic speakers. I was asking them the meaning of some words I had overheard them using or seen in print somewhere. I remember one was brega and it meant "cradle". Then I asked about the word skánc and was told it mean "raisins". And finally I figured out that vízöntek meant "manatee", which was a transparent compound of víz "water" and öntek "ox". That made me think perhaps they were speaking Hungarian after all.

Notes: Víz actually means "water" in Hungarian, but AFAIK öntek has no meaning (although it resembles the Magyar words öntet "icing" and önnek "to/for him/her/it"). I can't find any equivalents for the other terms with meanings anywhere close to what I gave them in my dream.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby eskandar » 2017-04-14, 6:38

Had a dream in which I was speaking Arabic and struggled to come up with a word I wanted, though I eventually remembered it in the dream. After waking up and thinking about it, I wondered: was I actively thinking in the dream, as I would be while awake? Or was the dream just giving a realistic depiction of how I actually speak a language I'm not fully fluent in? The latter seems more likely, but it was really interesting and I'm still wondering about it.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-14, 14:25

If I had a dream like that, I think I would think it really was active thinking.
linguoboy wrote:I remember one was brega and it meant "cradle".

Briga in Serbo-Croatian can mean 'care' or 'nurture'.

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-19, 17:13

I dreamt that one of the other departments at work had completely changed the team that was supposed to be collaborate with us on a particular workflow and I was meeting the new employees. One was a Chinese-American who introduced herself as "Pi", pronounced like the Greek letter. I asked her, "Oh, which pi?" Then I thought better of it and apologised for the question. But now I'd aroused her curiosity. So I clarified, "I mean which character?" and flipped to a page in my notebook where I'd scribbled out some Hanzi.

She challenged me to guess by I literally couldn't think of a single character with the pronunciation pi. I did remember 必, however, and banking on the fact that the same phonetic is often used for corresponding voiceless syllables, I tried to write out a [nonexistent] character [彡必]. But I got nervous and wrote down [必必], which just made her laugh.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-19, 21:21

I had quite a spooky dream involving Satan and me speaking Hebrew and Latin. Hebrew was more or less real Hebrew, I remember asking a kid (because yeah, there were also a few creepy Satanic kiddos in the dream) eyfo hu? (=where is he?), by "hu" meaning Satan, whereas I'm pretty sure Latin was basically gibberish.

I don't remember the plot though, actually I don't think there was a plot, it was just Satan and his devotees appearing to me in random occasions, oh I also remember some alive mannequins trying to strangle me, and a creepy carousel, and some drag queens.

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby mōdgethanc » 2017-05-20, 9:47

IpseDixit wrote:I had quite a spooky dream involving Satan and me speaking Hebrew and Latin. Hebrew was more or less real Hebrew, I remember asking a kid (because yeah, there were also a few creepy Satanic kiddos in the dream) eyfo hu? (=where is he?), by "hu" meaning Satan, whereas I'm pretty sure Latin was basically gibberish.

I don't remember the plot though, actually I don't think there was a plot, it was just Satan and his devotees appearing to me in random occasions, oh I also remember some alive mannequins trying to strangle me, and a creepy carousel, and some drag queens.
Dude, are your dreams always something out of a survival horror video game?
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-21, 16:29

mōdgethanc wrote:Dude, are your dreams always something out of a survival horror video game?


Luckily no.

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Vlürch » 2017-08-01, 22:09

Last night (well, this morning), I had a dream where my Uzbek wanderlust boiled over. Same pun I posted the last time I wanderlusted for Uzbek, I know... I just can't resist it. I don't know how to describe the dream in a way that isn't NSFW, so... NSFW.

In it, I was in Uzbekistan and had the ghost of Islam Karimov as a tour guide. He was like a living person in every way except that he could turn invisible at will, and had to eat, drink and go to the toilet like everybody else. For some reason, we had a really small car and the driver was ridiculously hyperreligious, pulling over and getting out of the car to pray in the middle of the road at the most random times. Everyone else using the road honked like hell whenever he did. It annoyed Karimov so much that at one point he used some kind of a spell to summon Putin, who was wearing tiny short shorts and a fanny pack, and they went to a gas station's bathroom together for what felt like forever. The driver got mad when he saw them coming back holding hands and kissing, but I couldn't understand anything he said. Karimov started excitedly explaining to me in a combination of Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, English and a few horribly pronounced Finnish words that there was something I had to see inside the gas station without even hinting at what it was.

So, I followed him inside while Putin took shirtless selfies flexing his muscles with a duckface. At the back of the building, there was a huge boiler, and Karimov hugged it with a blissful smile. We went back outside and saw Putin in the car, he was in the driver's seat and had an Uzbek pop song with lyrics about unicorns playing really loud; the only word I could understand for certain was "yakkashox" (unicorn), but it was really annoying. Neither of them could grasp why I didn't like it since I like unicorns, and started discussing My Little Pony and asking me what my favourite pony was. I was like "fuck MLP, it's shit and I don't watch it", which they also couldn't understand. Apparently, they thought MLP invented unicorns.

I'm not sure how we ended up near the Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan, but we did, and there was Berdimuhamedow dancing to Gangnam Style. He spoke English with a really posh British accent, except that he pronounced literally every /s/ and /z/ as [θ] and [ð], raving on and on about how he loved Kim Jong-un's music and that together they had the biggest collection of any franchise's trading cards in the world. He had a Snorlax plushie made to look like Niyazov and a Pikachu like Kim Jong-il, which he talked to in the kind of high-pitched voice people use to talk to pets or babies. Every time the chorus of Gangnam Style started, he made dramatic poses and squealed about his love for Kim's voice. I asked him if he knew that Psy was actually not Kim Jong-un, and he got offended and told me that he wouldn't give me any MLP memorabilia no matter how hard I begged. I told him I didn't care, which Putin and Karimov were shocked to hear, and they all were like "this is why Finland wasn't accepted into the Soviet Union".

For some reason, their mood quickly shifted and we were at Berdimuhamedow's huge mansion. There was a golden statue depicting him standing next to a horse, both with erections. His was slightly larger than the horse's. We went inside and through the building to the backyard, where he had a unicorn. It was obviously just a regular horse with a dildo strapped to its head but he insisted it was a birthday gift from Kim Jong-un, who he still didn't believe wasn't Psy, and we were back inside and he was suddenly wearing nothing but a jockstrap made of Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards and did hip-thrusting dance moves directed at Mirziyoyev, who had at some point appeared. Berdimuhamedow said "this guy is teaching me Uzbek" and winked at me, Putin and Karimov, after which they went to a bed with pink curtains, closed the curtains and started groaning "ooOOO, OOOOOOHHH".

Putin opened a portal for me and Karimov to go through, and we came out in presumably Tashkent. There was some old woman who tried to talk to me, but it was all in Uzbek and really fast so I couldn't understand anything. Karimov turned invisible and whispered in my ear what to say, I did and she stopped. We went into a hotel and he turned back to visible, and there were two Kanye Wests having sex. We ignored them and started watching TV, there was news and it was about how scientists have performed some kind of experiment that caused the value of anime to skyrocket, and it would become the official global currency. The weather forecast was narrated by a smug anime girl with huge boobs, it was in Uzbek so I only understood a handful of words but got that there would be a sharp increase in pregnancies caused by air pressure or something. They showed a tweet from Trump about anime being cancer and the weather girl declared jihad on him, urging all anime girls to convert to Islam.

I tried to ask Karimov about how that made any sense but he had turned invisible again, so I went outside and tried to talk to random people in Uzbek to learn the language better. They taught me a few words and sentences, but then they started laughing and I could feel someone pissing on me to make it look like I was pissing myself. It was obviously Karimov, but I didn't know where he was so I flailed around in all directions to push him away and everyone laughed even more. I realised it must look like I was having a seizure so I tried to explain really loudly "I'M NOT HAVING A SEIZURE" but someone misunderstood it and started calling an ambulance.

That's when I woke up, and of course had to go to the toilet. I did go back to sleep, but can't remember what dreams I had, if any. Also, there were a lot of details that I don't remember about the weird ass dream, which is annoying since it was definitely even weider than that. Oh well. :P

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-08-01, 23:54

No offense, but that dream sounds hilarious. :rotfl:

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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby mōdgethanc » 2017-08-02, 1:34

Welp, good luck to you and your therapist.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Dormouse559 » 2017-08-13, 4:57

The other day, I was trying to come up with an example sentence for the French phrase "C'est dommage que …" (It's too bad that …), but it was late, and I started to doze off. In my half-sleep I managed to come up with a sentence, but it was unexpected: C'est dommage qu'elle ne se soit pas vue dans le miroir. (It's too bad she didn't see herself in the mirror.) :shock: For one thing, I composed a grammatically correct sentence while half asleep (Yay!), but apparently, I had vampires on my subconscious.
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Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2017-10-03, 17:47

I can't remember what preceded this, but at some point a German friend of mine started reciting "Jabberwocky" in Hungarian and I was trying to follow along with him from a published translation. We ended up trying to count to thirty in Gothic but were getting for too much interference from German.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

הענט

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby הענט » 2017-10-04, 6:54

That's a very detailed dream, Vlürch. Wish I had dreams like yours. :)


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