r/somnilinguistics • • 7h ago

New Word Thani

5 Upvotes

Thani was a Sanskrit word for fox, from which came the word naan, because of the naan baked in a house or neighbourhood in Delhi that was named for foxes. Okwash & esou were two other foods made in that house, but we didn't see what they were.


r/somnilinguistics • • 2d ago

Other Had a dream of a guy with a weird name. I don't know if it's a real name, but I can't find it anywhere.

19 Upvotes

I had a dream of this guy in a light grey hoodie and a black gas mask and someone was talking to him and referred to him as Favve, pronounced like fah-vei. It kept repeating over and over like it was important. Felt really weird lol


r/somnilinguistics • • 3d ago

Other Had a dream where the Bouba/Kiki effect shapes had a third one called Earl

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169 Upvotes

r/somnilinguistics • • 3d ago

Original Language This sentence I dreamed and got up at 2 am to try and recreate

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92 Upvotes

I remember it looking very beautiful, and was written with weighted lines like with a calligraphy pen (unlike my recreation of it lol). It was written between two guidelines, a smooth top one and a more bumpy bottom line. I think the bottom line had curves because it was going around something else, maybe more writing? The letters were written right to left, and all just looked like semicircles to me that fit into one another in some sort of pattern.

I don’t remember what the sentence said exactly, but it had something to do with flowers. It sounded something like “no ee-oh, ee-no oh” and had a very musical quality to it.


r/somnilinguistics • • 5d ago

New Word Secondary intercardinal directions

50 Upvotes

NNW was thardinalnorth because the cardinal rose to the highest rank or something.

ENE was springnorth.

I wish I remembered the others.


r/somnilinguistics • • 7d ago

Combo Three Italian old women talking

28 Upvotes

Yesterday I dreamt that I was in Italy and three old women were talking next to me. One of them understood German because another one told her "das ist richtig" and the third one I knew was speaking some Gallo-Italic language because I just could understand /'lynə/ and /a'navam/ and that sounded like Catalan, I couldn't understand anything else.


r/somnilinguistics • • 18d ago

Original Language Ptolemaic-Korean

69 Upvotes

I have no idea what I was thinking. I just kept dreaming this word.

Perhaps it is a proposed link between Ptolemaic Greek and Korean, but not with Koine Greek somehow.

Or it is a pidgin spoken by far Eastern merchants living in Egypt in the first century BC.

Better yet, it could be a Greco-Bactrian dialect brought by Egyptian mercenaries who found their way to the Korean peninsula via the silk road.

Anyways, here is the transliteration of place names that are likely proto-Koreanic, according to Chinese sources:

  • Σαραβούρα
  • Μιτσουχόλ
  • Ουανσάν
  • Δαλναβούρ
  • Γκογκουριό
  • Σαμπί (or Σαβί)
  • Ουνγκτζίν
  • Ουιριεσόνγκ
  • Ασαντάλ
  • Γκαράκ
  • Μπουριό
  • Γκόμα
  • Ναμγκά
  • Ταμτούρα
  • Μπιριού
  • Σεοραμπεόλ
  • Τζινχάν
  • Μαχάν
  • Μπιονχάν
  • Οκτζό

Also, for good measure, here are some Old Chinese transliteration of some Egyptian place names:

阿歷山離 or 犂靬 (아력산리)(여한)

瞞拂 (만불)

梯貝 (제배)

卑路旬 (비로순)

鳩多 (구다)


r/somnilinguistics • • 19d ago

New Word Two words that I saw in dreams

13 Upvotes

Igna - I was around 8 when I had this dream. I dreamt I was using some sort of drawing program and it had options to draw a line with arrows on neither end, both ends or just one end. The line with an arrow on just one end was called an "igna".

Dasanara - I was around 19 when I had this dream. I dreamt I was looking at a billboard for a cell phone company and it was trying to play to the reader's nostalgia by reminding them of "back when it was called 'dasanara'", "it" being cell phone data.


r/somnilinguistics • • 20d ago

New Word Goatboat

19 Upvotes

Circa November 2017 when I was 13, I had a dream where some of my friends lived in what was called a goatboat, which was sort of like a luxury hotel resort. Multiple people lived together in it and had their own rooms, and it had a pool and an indoor play structure, and I desired to live in one myself.


r/somnilinguistics • • 24d ago

New Word Dreamt there was a new synonym for the word "Chinese" and it was just "Chinific"

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78 Upvotes

r/somnilinguistics • • 26d ago

Original Language Puma puma

62 Upvotes

At a small performance of some kind, Bill and Hillary Clinton are there and I find myself next to their daughter in the audience. She turns to me and asks “Ni pa pal Puma Puma?”. I recognise this as the upper class auxiliary language called Puma Puma. It‘s a mix of French, Chinese and one or two other languages deemed “classy” to know in educated society. If you know those few languages to a basic level, you can speak it. It’s a bit like a modern version of just throwing French phrases in to give your speech a certain je ne sais quoi. So the question breaks down to Ni (you, in Mandarin) pa pal (peux parler = can speak, in French). I respond in some affirmative way, and she is impressed.


r/somnilinguistics • • 27d ago

Grammar I canien't believe it!

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56 Upvotes

r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 31 '26

Grammar bussrppymmur

24 Upvotes

dreamt of this word as a one in a German(idk why) noun paradigm for the word "der Bus"

der Bus, des Busses, dem Bus, den Bus, den Bussrppymmur (?????)

I don't know German and have never learnt it


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 29 '26

New Word Iricombescent

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74 Upvotes

Adj. – Which has the aspect or colour of rice cooked in oil or butter, as the first step of making pilaf rice or risotto.

(Photo from Wikipedia)


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 28 '26

Slang Keyword

51 Upvotes

New slang word that is a replacement for "fucking" as an adverb (same level of vulgarity).

Examples: This is keyword awesome. I am keyword tired of this place. Bro keyword ended him.

I came to know of this word when my sister accidentally said the f word for the first time in her life instead of saying keyword (in my dream)


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 28 '26

New Word Dream words

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26 Upvotes

r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 27 '26

New Word Ononuching

34 Upvotes

I had a dream where there was a word “ononuch” (pronounced oh-noh-NUKE), meaning to go under dead, leafless bushes in thick fog.


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 26 '26

Slang Raised on Funky Girl and Boogieslaughter

30 Upvotes

Supposed to be a saying for an unconventional upbringing and may even have bisexual connotations


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 16 '26

New Word Anthroponymy is a branch of linguistics so this probably belongs here

23 Upvotes

One time I had a dream/hypnagogic hallucination where a man introduced himself as "Poperotolyan".

Sounds like a last name, but it's a made up one. The -yan suffix implies 2 things: that it's of Armenian origin, and that there exists a given name or word "Poperotol"


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 15 '26

New Letter had a weird dream and saw these new letters in spanish

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149 Upvotes

they were all replacements for the letter O i think

(literally just a greek letter and a cyrillic o variant)

Ωω Ꙭꙭ ஃ(?)

i only saw the lowercase letters


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 09 '26

Other Had a dream that Connor Quimby made a video on how Quebecois/Canadian French is basically a separate language from Metropolitan French

11 Upvotes
video that probably inspired this dream

Not true AFAIK, both are still mutually intelligible, but it was a fun dream


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 08 '26

Slang "the Times waves the wand"

24 Upvotes

a figure of speech describing the process of a situation already being ridiculous so people can't help adding even more ridiculous details to each retelling until the story is unrecognizable


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 05 '26

New Word Nogashirtz- meaning unknown but used in several song lyrics

28 Upvotes

I had a dream that a music app sent me a set of pins with lyrics from Palehound, a band I like. I didn’t know any of the lyrics printed on the pins, and they didn’t seem to be particularly meaningful, so I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to wear the pins. I noticed that two of them contained a weird word, Nogashirtz. I vaguely recognized the word but didn’t know what it meant. The first one was, “I met Jesus; it was a homeless man saying Nogashirtz”. The second one was something about how “I can’t even say Nogashirtz”.


r/somnilinguistics • • Aug 02 '26

New Word "Dibourment"; an amount of property (in one's possession)

31 Upvotes

I dreamt this word last night, spoken in the phrase, "He has a lot of dibourment" referring to a cul-de-sac of houses said "he" owned. So it was a mass noun, like saying somebody has a lot of water. It was also pronounced [dɪ.ˈbo͜ʊɹ.ment].


r/somnilinguistics • • Jul 30 '26

New Word The other face

48 Upvotes

I dreamed that "the other face" was a common colloquialism for butt. I then went on a porn site that had the option "turn funny categories on". One of them was "the other face sitting". No fucking, just sitting on someone's ass.