Re: reality?

J. Barefoot wrote:
>
> As an aside to the whole thing, I've been watching this Twilight Zone
> Marathon and one episode got me thinking (at about one o'clock this
> morning becauses I couldn't sleep). It was about a man condemned to the
> electric chair. He tries to warn everyone that when he dies they'll all
> die too because the whole world that they think is 'reality' is just a
> dream he's having. Well it turns out that he's right and all these
> people's lives are really just his recurring nightmare. So it makes me
> think that maybe somewhere there's people who speak Yisian or Teonaht or
> Nova or Brithenig (maybe somewhere in the Twilight Zone?) and that
> whenever we say "Allright enough of this nonsense for right now, I've
> got to do some actual work" perhaps it's an act of genocide.
> Remember, I came up with this at one this morning.
>
> Jen
>

I also wonder sometimes what's real and what isn't.  When I was 15-16,
and began making up my Conlang Tesk in boring maths classes, I knew a
little Dutch and nothing at all about Afrikaans. I changed Dutch and
German words in various ways, and many years later discovered that I'd
changed them into Afrikaans. This thread seems to me to relate to a kind
of linguistic version of deja vu - knowing words before we learn them,
and knowing language before we learn it.

On a separate (but maybe not entirely unrelated) note, my 3-year old son
has used a very cute expression over the past few weeks.  He got a
flashlight to play with, and when he wants to be able to see it to its
full extent he says "Turn on the darkness" so that we'll turn the lights
off.

(Actually, he says it mainly in Hebrew (he's bilingual, but his Hebrew
is dominant)).

"Turn on the darkness!" Easy to see why he makes the mistake, but the
phrase has an eery kind of wisdom to it.


        Shaul Vardi