《词源考古研究所》-英国人也信“鬼压床”？世界大同啊！

关注视频号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】，主页【商品橱窗】中进入购买即可，满满干货不要错过哦~ 1)Nightmare a.Comes from the Old English word mære. b.A mære or mare is an evil female spirit who visits sleeping people on a horse and sit on their chests to kill them. c.They also bring bad dreams and tangle up people’s hair. Hi, everyone. And welcome back to our new segment【It means what?】 Yeah!!! Stop it now. (kidding) Awh~ 欢迎回来, 我们的新板块【词源考古研究所】. Hi, 安澜. Hi, Lulu, hi, everyone. In the segment, we are sharing with you interesting origin, stories, words and phrases. So what is our word for today？ Today's word is nightmare. Nightmare就是噩梦. Bad dreams, UMM. Yes, we do say bad dreams in English as well, but nightmare as a word is even older. It comes from somewhere that's even scarier. I sometimes wondered, I know ‘night’, but where does the word ‘mare’ come from？ Mare nowadays in English means a horse, a female horse. Mare现在是有母马的意思, but I'm pretty sure the origin has nothing to do with horses. It's got something to do with horses, okay？But this particular ‘mare’ comes from an old English word ‘mære’. Now a mære is actually an evil female spirit. 就是恶灵这种感觉. So this spirit visit sleeping people on a horse and sits on their chest to try and kill them. Yeah, when you say old English, I’m guessing because I am a fanatic of folklore, most of our listeners know this. Now if you say old English lore that most likely this folklore or this whole evil spirit, it comes from Scandinavia? Yeah, Germany, Scandinavia, Nordic countries. We shared a very similar religious belief system. Especially old English is very Germanic. Very very Germanic. 日耳曼系或者说是Scandinavian就北欧的这些传说里面, they have this evil spirit mare. So it's the whole idea of sleep paralysis when you’re sleeping and you wake up but can't move. You know we have the exact word in Chinese, alright, it's called ‘鬼压床’, literally translates into ghost or spirit crushes you in your bed. Yeah, we have exactly the same in English. And this whole mare what you said visits sleeping people and sits on their chest to kill them or to crush them, this whole idea is basically it's a very vivid, very graphic imagery. You can actually see it in some of the artworks. Yeah. It all comes down to that very common phenomenon of sleep paralysis. I think everybody at one time or another, they feel that they've woken up in the night, but they can't move. I think a lot of this obviously has medical explanations behind it, but let's say, people in the olden days they couldn't explain with science, or like medical science. So they could only explain this with the idea of an evil spirit. Exactly. And actually I did some research. So in Norwegian and Danish, in these two northern European languages, the words for nightmare can be directly translated as ‘mare ride’. 所以在挪语和丹麦语里 nightmare这个词直译 ‘mare ride’, basically a mare this evil spirit is riding on you, scary. It is terrifying. In old English, we believe that they used to bring bad dreams and also quite strangely, they used to tangle up people's hair. So they messed people's hair. So when you wake up in the morning and your hair is all over the place, it's not because you were tossing and turning bed. It was because an evil spirit came and played with your hair.