UniLang

Most of my dreams that I remember don't involve interaction with people all that much but I think in English during them. On odd occasion I will hear Japanese or Serbian in my dreams but very rarely.

The only example that can come to mind is this dream I had where I was travelling in town somewhere and I heard someone speaking Japanese. Since I was learning it at the time for school I really wanted to practice it with them as this was a rare opportunity (there aren't that many Japanese in Sydney) and when I got close to the speaker I was disappointed to find out that they were not Japanese (I think they were Indian or something) and were just practicing the few phrases they knew themselves.

EDIT: The night after I posted this I had a dream in Esperanto. I dreamt that I was in a book shop looking to buy Esperanto books and was asking about them in Esperanto with the lady at the counter. Pretty cool

I just woke up from a dream. I almost always forget my dreams, and in fact, as usual, I've forgotten most of this one already. All I remember is that at some point, my brother and two of our cousins (and if there was anybody else, probably only two people at most) were eating out at a restaurant. I'm pretty sure they served water and various other drinks just like other restaurants here do, but my brother and I had tea exactly the way we would get it every morning whenever we took a trip to India: hot, mixed with lots of milk, and served in small glasses. Even though most of what I can remember of this dream was in English, I remember that I used the Malayalam word for 'tea' ([ˈtʃaːja]), because that's what everybody in our family always calls it anyway. There was something that had happened earlier on in this dream, and I "toasted" it with my brother by clinking my glass of tea against his, to the amusement of my cousins, one of whom joked, "Yeah, we're all a bunch of alcoholics."

I'm pretty sure it was around this point that I woke up (or started waking up) because my dad called my name softly (but loud enough for me to hear; apparently, my mom has been hearing voices lately and keeps thinking she hears people talking when nobody is ). I then tried to remember what I could, and in the process, I came up with a sentence in Turkish for some reason. Then I also thought something in Hindi and for God knows what reason came up with an exhortation jai jhalak, which probably makes zero sense (especially in context ) and which I just made up anyway. Finally, my cousin's sarcastic remark reminded me of the only Indian movie song I know of so far where a woman very candidly admits to being drunk (the Bollywood song "Haan, Jee Haan, Maine Sharab Pi Hai" which basically means 'yeah, yeah, I drank wine' from Seeta Aur Geeta (1972)).

but my brother and I had tea exactly the way we would get it every morning whenever we took a trip to India: hot, mixed with lots of milk, and served in small glasses

I never quite got how so many cultures serve tea in glassware. I tried doing it as a kid and got scolded because I was told the hot water would make the glass break. (It's not like I had the glass in the freezer beforehand, so...) What's the secret? Are the glasses just really thick?

mōdgethanc wrote:

but my brother and I had tea exactly the way we would get it every morning whenever we took a trip to India: hot, mixed with lots of milk, and served in small glasses

I never quite got how so many cultures serve tea in glassware. I tried doing it as a kid and got scolded because I was told the hot water would make the glass break. (It's not like I had the glass in the freezer beforehand, so...) What's the secret? Are the glasses just really thick?

No, they're just normal glasses, I think, so I'm not sure there's any secret behind it. I mean, I think my grandma's glasses were kind of rounded towards the bottom (like this one), but that's the only difference I can think of. But whenever anybody serves tea in India, it's always poured from a height into the glass from the pot and then back into the pot (also from a height), then back into the glass and so on until the tea cools down somewhat.

mōdgethanc wrote:What's the secret? Are the glasses just really thick?

No, but if you pour any hot liquid into a glass too quickly, it will (or may) crack. So the secret is to be careful. My parents have these kind of glasses for glogg and I was always told to put only a little of glogg in before adding the rest, so that the glass has time to warm up. I think pouring tea from a height has the same idea?

So I have been binge watching the Walking Dead, seriously crazily binge watching that I am almost finished season four. Anyway last last night I had a dream anout the walking dead but everyone was speaking in Spanish (mostly gibberish but for some reason in my dream it was Spanish). It was one of the oddest dreams I ever had lol

Naava wrote:

mōdgethanc wrote:What's the secret? Are the glasses just really thick?

No, but if you pour any hot liquid into a glass too quickly, it will (or may) crack. So the secret is to be careful. My parents have these kind of glasses for glogg and I was always told to put only a little of glogg in before adding the rest, so that the glass has time to warm up. I think pouring tea from a height has the same idea?

Well, when you pour tea from a height, that also helps cool it down as air passes through it before it lands into the glass (or pot).

Meera wrote:So I have been binge watching the Walking Dead, seriously crazily binge watching that I am almost finished season four. Anyway last last night I had a dream anout the walking dead but everyone was speaking in Spanish (mostly gibberish but for some reason in my dream it was Spanish). It was one of the oddest dreams I ever had lol

A few weeks ago I, too, had several dreams in which I "spoke" some languages that I had never studied. That was kind of weird.
Algumas semanas atrás eu tambem fiz vários sonhos nos quais "falava" unas línguas que nunca tinha estudado. Foi bastante estranho.

vijayjohn wrote:

Naava wrote:

mōdgethanc wrote:What's the secret? Are the glasses just really thick?

No, but if you pour any hot liquid into a glass too quickly, it will (or may) crack. So the secret is to be careful. My parents have these kind of glasses for glogg and I was always told to put only a little of glogg in before adding the rest, so that the glass has time to warm up. I think pouring tea from a height has the same idea?

Well, when you pour tea from a height, that also helps cool it down as air passes through it before it lands into the glass (or pot).

My family and I always pour tea in a glass and never from height, and I have never had one break.

Meera wrote:

vijayjohn wrote:

Naava wrote:

mōdgethanc wrote:What's the secret? Are the glasses just really thick?

No, but if you pour any hot liquid into a glass too quickly, it will (or may) crack. So the secret is to be careful. My parents have these kind of glasses for glogg and I was always told to put only a little of glogg in before adding the rest, so that the glass has time to warm up. I think pouring tea from a height has the same idea?

Well, when you pour tea from a height, that also helps cool it down as air passes through it before it lands into the glass (or pot).

My family and I always pour tea in a glass and never from height, and I have never had one break.

Where I from it is universally believed that putting a tea spoon into your glass prevents it from breaking when pouring hot water into it. (This could make a plot for Myth Busters.)

I'm no physicist, but I see no plausible reason why that would work, so I'm going to jump the gun here and declare it busted.

Maybe the time that the tea spends sitting there while it's steeping makes a difference? If it takes five minutes to steep, then it must have cooled down a bit in the meantime.

mōdgethanc wrote:Maybe the time that the tea spends sitting there while it's steeping makes a difference?

Well, that's definitely not what it is in chai, because you boil the liquid with the tea immersed in it. (OK, you probably knew that already. Sorry ). And of course there's the whole process I mentioned of alternating between the pot and the glass/cup/whatever.

I had to google it, and I found a conversation in Finnish. A nickname polymath says there that when pouring hot liquid into a glass, the inner side of the glass warms up faster than the outer side, which creates tension. This tension may crack the glass.
Polymath also says that thick glass breaks more easily, because the heat conduction through thin glass is faster than through thick one.

Sounds good enough for me. I don't know about the spoon, but pouring a little bit of glogg or tea or whatever you have into the glass before adding the rest might give time for the glass to warm up.

I tried google again and found this conversation. (This time in English.) There's something about the spoon, too.

Oh, I forgot my tea in the kitchen while just googling what happens if you pour tea in a glass. Sometimes I really wonder how my memory works.

Naava wrote:I had to google it, and I found a conversation in Finnish. A nickname polymath says there that when pouring hot liquid into a glass, the inner side of the glass warms up faster than the outer side, which creates tension. This tension may crack the glass.
Polymath also says that thick glass breaks more easily, because the heat conduction through thin glass is faster than through thick one.

I tried google again and found this conversation. (This time in English.) There's something about the spoon, too.

Well, I'll be dipped in shit! It never occurred to me that thick glass would break more easily because of that. I guess that says something about my sorry knowledge of physics. And it's kind of neat that there may be a grain of truth to the myth about the spoon too. What I'm wondering is: would it make a significant difference if the spoon were cold?

Oh, I forgot my tea in the kitchen while just googling what happens if you pour tea in a glass. Sometimes I really wonder how my memory works.

Oh, the irony!

We used to make tea everyday in the morning on glasses, cause we didn't have any cups or mugs at the time. And it was always fine with the ordinary glasses that we use to drink water. Only once a glass broke. Sometimes the glass cracks without breaking so we continue using it.s

I dreamt that I was going through a box of books provided free of charge courtesy of the Catalan government. At first I was thrilled, but I found that most were duplicates and they were chiefly pretty basic works. There were dozens of copies of the same basic Catalan dictionary, for instance (furnished with a yellow-and-green cover, for some odd reason). Worse, they were almost all mini editions.

One of the few exceptions was a bilingual children's book. Oddly, however, the two languages were French and Nynorsk. I don't remember the exact title; it began with Nous sommes... in French and Vi er bra... in Norwegian.

First appearance of Irish in a long time.

I was in a corner surrounded with bookshelves. I think it was a secondhand shop or flea market rather than a bookstore or library. I was paging through a simple glossary in a foreign language (Dutch?) trying to find their equivalent of the name "Edward" when I overheard two men chatting near the doorway and realised they were speaking Irish. I felt a little uncomfortable, since on the one hand I knew this was an opportunity I couldn't pass up and on the other I expected I'd have trouble expressing myself. It didn't help that they both had Connacht accents.

One of the men came over and started browsing the shelves. He turned out to be a learner, too, because he said something like "I'm looking for Welsh" and left the word "Welsh" in English. I meant to respond with "I haven't seen any Welsh", but what I actually said ("Táim gan féachaint ar Chimris") was a little garbled ("I haven't looked at Cymric"). He replied to me, now using the word "Cimris", too. (The actual Irish word is Breatnais.)

Then my doofus husband made too much noise and I woke up.

I dreamt that it was the first day of August and I decided to go to Lapland. I bought a ticket and flew there. I was in Rovaniemi and I was walking through its streets; I heard a lot of people speaking Saami (I don't know a word of it); I heard a lot of [ʃ] and [tʃ], whereas Finnish has only [s], and I recognised some words due to their resemblance to the Finnish language, which I know a little.
Then suddenly I was in Italy near the Austrian border. I had to go to Germany. I asked a girl how I could get there; she answered in Italian, with a strange accent - probably a Friulan accent - that I had to take a train to Emstetten (I see now that Emsdetten - with "d" - is a little city in northern Germany!). I took a bus to the train station and the wheather was getting worse and it started snowing. Someone told me, in a strange Italian accent and some German words, that it was normal, since, although we were in summer, the altitude of the station was 1900 metres (6230 feet) above the sea level.

Massimiliano B wrote:whereas Finnish has only [s]

Finnish does have š, too, although only in loanwords.

I know, but loanwords don't matter.