Re: weirdness!

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Aidan Grey wrote:

> How often do people dream about someone else's conlang? Or their
>own, for that matter.
Dreams are a good place for discovering elements of concultures and
conlangs. I haven't dreamt in anything other than English for a while,
but there is a project of mine called rather unimaginatively "Dream
Language". It is an agglomeration of Irish words and morphology that I
learnt in school, and words and morphology that I've dreamt.

The curious thing about the dreamed words is that they've all turned
out to be reasonably close to Welsh and Irish words I'd never heard
or looked up before. It was rather surprising to dream the words "cal"
(wrist) and "clur" (palm) only to find caol in the Gaelic dict. and
cledr in the Welsh.

The dream itself was also a bit odd. The only thing I can think of is
that I was in this kind of combination culinary / medical school. Our
anatomy lab was being held in the kitchen, and we had to sing this
little chant over and over to learn the positions of the wrist and
hand bones. When we were done singing, we'd take these big cleavers
and chop up the corpses and toss the bits into the pots for the
culinary students.

This is the chant:

zhen dheu dhri naiv  im mair;  selk nein d'zhack im meiriv  cah;
1    2    3    bones in finger 6    9    12      in fingers four

zhen dheu dhri cah cou naiv  in gluir;
1    2    3    4   5   bones in palm

con dheu im boidh; co sah in gail; an  lav; con dhri don    guir.
w/  2    in thumb  w/ 7   in wrist the hand w/  3    to the arm

Pretty macabre, I know, but it does help one remember where the bones
are. Hm, I just _wonder_ if studying anatomy at the time had aught to
do with the dream ... :)

Later, a second dream had me teaching this language to a class
somewhere. I had written on the blackboard:

        is anm dom _____________ (My name is ____________ )

and these sentences:

1.  mai a ev don deir ameiricai.
(I have gone to the land (of) America.)

2.  is mi dhri tai a fueso in an deir.
(It's months 3 thou have been in the land.)

There, not half so messy as the previous dream!

Padraic.

>
>    Aidan
>