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Xenoglossy/Foreign Languages

Y

yozhik

Senior Registered
(I know there's a topic on this somewhere already, but I cannot find it. My apologies).

My husband, who has never had a French lesson in his life, can speak a surprising amount of French. He always does it in a funny voice, like a gruff old man. At first he just seemed to be stringing together random French words that an English speaker might know... "oo la la, coup d'etat, sauce bearnaise"... but lately, he's actually started saying French sentences.

This seems to have changed about the time our son was born. He speaks in the gruff tone because it amuses the baby, and the more he does it, the better his French gets. Over the weekend, for example, I was floored when he asked our son "Voulez-vous aller voir les elephants?" (Do you want to go see the elephants?)

I've actually spoken to him about this. He is a die-hard skeptic about reincarnation, but even he has to admit that he can't explain the French skills.

However, I am having an odd problem in that he does not know what he is saying, and I do! I am a little torn -- it is VERY interesting, and offers up some clues to one of his PLs, I'm sure. But on the other hand, what he says is often very vulgar, and not appropriate to be saying to the baby!

Any thoughts on what to do with this? I've been listening closely for any evidence of a dialect or place names, but so far haven't picked up on anything.

Thoughts? What would you do (if anything)? Could this be a clue to a PL he shared with the baby?

y.
 
Hi Y.

It's called Xenoglossy. Dr. Ian Stevenson has two volumes of such cases, one titled Xenoglossy and the other, Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy.

There is also a very interesting book written by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams - titled Reincarnation - A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society. There are several cases mentioned in the book and several references to various physiologists, physicians, and psychiatrists that have reported cases concerning their patients.

Have you every had past life memories that are in France?

I think the two of you should look into the phenomenon!!! It sounds like it is a family 'affair'

------------------
Love and Light,
Deborah

The soul's Center...is God.



[This message has been edited by Deborah (edited 10-29-2001).]
 
Hi Yozhik

Did you check out the Stevenson information?
I would be very interested in your thoughts.
What did your husband say? Did he look at it?


------------------
Love and Light,
Deborah

The soul's Center...is God.
 
Hi yozhik,

I find your husband's experience very interesting. I would like to hear more...when I was a kid, I had the experience of making up an indian launguage with my playmates as we "played" indians on the frontier. I don't know if it was real or not, but your experience reminded me.

Please tell us more....

Susie
 
I haven't gotten a chance to check out the Stevenson info yet, but am very curious. I'd heard of xenoglossy under hypnosis, but not under "regular" conditions like this.

He jokes about "being French in a past life", but isn't interested in investigating further. I think he thinks it's related to some French ancestors of his.

I have no past life memories in France, myself... although I know I was with my husband in at least one other life, where he was my mother and I was his son. I don't think we were in France, though. The French skills seem to come out more with the baby than with me, though (with me it's usually just French-sounding gibberish)... although his accent has always been so good it's uncanny, and occasionally I'll say something in French and he'll unconsciously correct me.

A lot of what he says is quite obscene -- he's propositioned the baby more than once without realizing it. Between that and the gruff voice he sounds like he a dirty old man... :)

yozhik
 
I suspect I have had at least one past life in Canada, and yes, the one with my husband may well have been in Canada. However, in the one I know about he was female, not male... and from the French snippets he speaks this is clearly not the same persona. :) That life was somewhere in the late 1800s, I think.

Would the language skills tend to indicate a recent PL? If so, I'm guessing we may not have been together then... in my most recent PL I believe I lived somewhere in Central Europe, and spoke German.

Or is there reason to believe that since I've heard him speak French, that I knew him then?

yozhik
 
Xenoglossy - language from another life

Hi all:

Wondering if there's anyone here who's had an experience with xenoglossy -- the speaking, while in regression, of a language known in a past life but not known in this life. Have you done it, or witnessed it?

My favourite xenoglossy story, and I'm sorry but I can't remember where I read it, was the case of an English-speaking regressionist who was regressing a patient who spoke Chinese only, through an interpreter. Some time into the regression the patient returned to a past life in which she spoke fluent English, and began doing so. The interpreter dutifully translated it into Chinese, until the regressionist reminded her that this was not necessary!

But I am more interested in the experiences of others on this forum.

Love & peace,
Karen
 
HI Karen,

One of my family members chants in Ancient Aramaic, in the shower -no regressive state needed. She recorded it once and sent it to a language expert at a University to see if it was gibberish. He was amazed -- at the perfect pronunciation of the words and the correct slang used for a very long ago time period. This woman only has a high school diploma, no formal education, and never studied any language -- let alone ancient Aramaic.

In a trance state she also speaks fluent Indian. -(Hindu) xenoglossy is an amazing phenomenon -really.
"I have no more words. Let the soul speak with the silent articulation of a face." ---Rumi

How to donate to this forum - read here ;)
 
I have read of many examples and been told of a few personally, but I've never seen it. Once a past-life therapist sent me a tape that was supposed to be xenoglossy, of a woman speaking a 100-year-old dialect of Punjabi from India, lamenting the loss of her son in a war. I asked some native speakers to listen to it, and they said (rather politely) that it was "not language".

So I believe it happens, but I want to see it for myself! I certainly was never able to get a concrete example for my documentary over five years of trying, and it was on the top of my wish-list.

I did have a somewhat-related experience myself once. I was in a multi-cultural fair, and I passed by the middle-Eastern booth. There was a metal ornamental plate there with Arabic writing. I recognized the characters immediately as something I'd seen before, and I knew it was religious and that I was very-well acquainted with it. I asked what it meant, and (as I recall) I was told it meant "There is no God but Allah". Instantly I experienced a state of bliss that continued for about 15 minutes, and I decided that I must have meditated on this in a past life. Of course there's no way to prove it wasn't cryptoamnesia, except for the state of bliss and recognition I felt.

I would *love* to videotape or audiotape an interview for my website of someone who has experienced xenoglossy first-hand, including some audio samples. If anyone is willing to do this, please let me know. It's too late to put it in the documentary, but it can certainly go in the supporting information.
Steve S.
ssake1@yahoo.com
 
(Some minor experiences, nothing really...)

Years ago I had my radio on, and I thought people were talking my language - Finnish - there. So familiar it was that I didn't pay attention to it, until I suddenly realized that I don't really understand a word. It wasn't Finnish, it was Bengali from India (was said).

Reacently I saw a lucid dream (conscious dream) where I was hearing oriental music. A bit Arabian like, I guess. I started to sing along with it, and I sung with foreign language. I didn't know a thing about what I was singing, but all the words came out of my mouth naturally. Also I suddenly "remembered" what was my name in my life in India, but I don't remember it anymore... I think it was something like Karamcharya or anything that sounds a bit like that.

If there's anyone familiar to this name, please tell me!

Arabic kind of music and living in India? Well. Could it be possible that I lived in India when it was under Arabian control?
 
I had some xenoglossy experiences in a state of semi- trance or high emotion, it happened to me to sing or think of poetry in Ancient Greek,speak in Ancient Greek about the island of Mitilini, sing Sapphic poetry in Greek, it's very strange. Maybe I could have been Sappho or one of her lovers or best friends in a past life?

I also can speak in another language I don't know the origin. If it's really an ancient language, it seems to be lost. I wrote what I remembered,many words about ancient castes,nature, spirituality as well as their meaning. One of the phrases that I remember is: Andalisen'a te Rana Artemila semandi, meaning: Blessed Be and Glory to Artemis!
Semandi has an affirmative purpose or can mean " too, also" in that language"
Some other words as Khiani apru kali " Queen of the Sky" ,titles of Artemis in that language such as Kiri'adanian " She who brings justice", kalie'adanian " She who brings light", khelia'danian " she who brings courage", Mazreni" Mother of All", Adisha'danian" She who brings truth.
Probably the native language of the Amazons. It's the only civilization I can think of.
 
Lysippes, I have a life in Crimea, which I have recognized from my memories and from history and nature books. There was a tribe of women who worshipped devouring aspect of the Goddess; Artemis as a hunter and Kali (which was one of your words) of India.

Creeks have a story about Iphigeneia being transportet to Tauris (Crimea) to be sacrified to gods, put in some versions she wasn't sacrified, but came to be a high priestess instead, and an author to order foreign men to be hunted (and eaten). Stories about mainads go along with that, although I guess they were said to hunt animals. But the older thread in this mainad-story can be much mo cruel. I have myself wondered wether the stories about were wolfs and maby also about vampires came from those original Goddess worshiping priestess activities. (Or what ever they were.)

Anyway, this is just one proposition of many possibilities; around Mediterranean has happend a LOT during thousands of years...

What I have gotten into my mind from that life as a word is TAURAT, but I'm not sure if that has anything real base. If it rings a bell to you... then...?
 
I posted the following in the Children's Past Lives just last night, but it seems a little more suited to this discussion.

Beginning at about age 11 or 12, I would dream in fluent French. It was absolutely flawless and flowed easily in my thoughts. It far surpassed what I had learned in any French language classes. I could never quite remember all the words in my waking hours. It was only when I was drowsy or sleeping that they would come so effortlessly.

I still dream, once in awhile, in fluent French, and when I awake from the dreams I feel as though I am thinking in French and must translate my thoughts into English. The feeling does not last very long.

I am often told that I phrase things like a foreigner phrases things. As if I'm speaking in literal translations. I was born and raised in California, but I am constantly asked "Where are you from? Your accent is unusual." People either think I am British, German, Russian, French, Irish, or from the Southern States. Just recently I was told by a man, "My wife is from England, too. What part are you from?" And when I have travelled to Paris, I had no difficulty at all speaking with the Parisiens even though I had not studied French for many years.
 
Childhood Xenoglossy?

There's been some talk of xenoglossy on this board, and I find myself wondering if I've ever done it. My mom has a written record of my early years, and there's a note from when I was about three that says something like "Speaks in full sentences on the phone except when reverts to gibberish." We have recordings of me when I was little, but I've listened to them and none of them seem to indicate anything unusual. The only really interesting thing I found was the comment that I made in preschool one day: "It's a lot safer when you die because then you can't get hurt."

In general, I have a love for slavic languages. I have also discovered that I can speak fluently using the archaic English familiar address constructions "thee," "thou," and the verb conjugations associated with these words.

I wish there was some way to find out whether I was just speaking gibberish when I was little, or if it was xenoglossy. I suppose if it was another language it would be Norwegian, because that's what I grew up speaking in my most recent past life.

Alexandra
 
Welcome

Hi Alexandra,

Welcome to the forum. Have you been able to read through some of the information on the CPL website (not the forum) regarding xenoglossy? You might find it interesting.

It's hard to say - if your tape recordings are gibberish or actually another language. Ask everyone you know who speaks another language (good friends of course) if they notice anything on the tape. That's a start. Then if a language possibility reveals itself -find a language specialist for further documentation.
 
What is xenoglossy?

I may sound very stupid but I have never heard of it what is it?

Amanda
 
xenoglossy -- the speaking, while in regression, or spontaneously of a language known in a past life but not known in this life. Ian Stevenson has two volumes of cases, one titled Xenoglossy and the other, Unlearned Language; New Studies in Xenoglossy.

Two forms are known...recitative and responsive, in the first the subject repeats, without necessarily understanding, fragments of a strange language.

However, in responsive xenoglassy the subject is able to converse in the foreign language.
 
I know that at least one of my past lives took place in the southwestern part of the US, during the 1800's. I frequently dream in Spanish, a language that I know I spoke in that life.:D
 
Do you still use your former languages?

I've always loved other languages (maybe because my native tongue of English is so boring, unpoetic, and ugly as compared to something beautiful and nuanced like Italian or Greek), and sometimes use words or phrases from other languages (usually Russian or German). Ever since I found out about Oda when I was 15 years old, I've always counted in German (and to this day know all of the numbers, from zero up to infinity, whereas I'm rather rusty on my Spanish numbers, a language I spent 7 years learning as compared to German, which I never took any classes in). Sometimes I say a word or words in German without even meaning to, like Wasser instead of water or warum instead of why. It's not even trying to show off how many other languages I'm familiar with, just something that slips out without meaning to.
 
Hi HelplessDancer,

I speak Japanese rather well for a Caucasian, or so I am told. I had a psychic tell me that my Japanese ability is due a lot to the fact that I am "remembering" it from previously incarnating as a Japanese person.
 
I absolutely wanted to learn French as a kid,
I thought it was the most beautiful language that exists.
But I don't feel this attraction anymore, it's gone...
Later I started dreaming in German, and talking German in my sleep.
That's how I realized that I've lived in Germany before.
I always wanted to go there, to my hills and woods,
to the perfect country side.
I'm still fond of the German landscape,
and I also speak German,
though it also doesn't feel like my native tongue anymore.
I start to feel comfortable with English,
but the internet is to blame for that :)

Curious Girl.
 
English

From what little I think I know about my past lives, my mother tongue last time around was the same as in this life, but my native tongue in life before that was English. I cannot imagine speaking with that quaint English accent now! :) I came to USA as a student from India. When my graduate thesis came back form English language editor at the University, according to my thesis advisor, she did not find any error in language, usage, grammar or spelling, something she was not used to in theses submitted by local students.
 
For me its Spanish and Italian...I speak fluent Spanish, I took 2 years of it in high school but in the 2nd year the teacher jokingly told me she was going to kick me out because I didn't need her! She would ask us to write stories in Spanish and most students would make a paragraph of the simplest stuff, whereas I would write pages of stuff the class hadn't learned! I don't know if this has anything to do with a past life because I had many Mexican friends and I spoke it with them but I do love the music and culture and I will often say something to my kids in Spanish out of the blue and the funny thing is sometimes they actually understand me!
 
I'd always taken that my daughter Monika (11) was an Old Soul (from the moment of her birth - she was given to me and looked into my eyes with steady focus), whereas son Edmund (8) was not. He did not make eye contact for many months... Monika spoke of her past life from an early age, Edmund didn't. Recently, he's taken to teaching himself Russian, and has volunteered to me that his past life was indeed in Russia. He says he remembers his wedding, under a portrait of Lenin and Stalin (!). He's taught himself the Russian alphabet and is interested in Russian aviation, he always runs to the window whenever a Tupolev airliner is flying overhead, on the flightpath the Warsaw airport...

Still, my past life was born in Ireland, then emigrated in childhood to America, and Monika claims to have lived in Victorian England.

Michal
 
A Brush With Xenoglossy

When I was about 20, I was driving home alone from work around midnight and turned on the car radio. For about 10 minutes I listened to a preacher but didn't pay conscious attention to him; his words were simply background noise. Then the speaker said something I considered beyond ridiculous, and I thought, "You idiot!"

At that moment I realized the man was speaking German, and with that realization and in mid-sentence as he spoke, I couldn't understand a word he said.

The radio station is in a town about 50 miles away from the city where I lived. The town and its surroundings have a large Mennonite population, and the radio button was turned to that station because in addition to religious programming in German and English, it plays a lot of classical music. But German is foreign to me — I do not understand it and cannot read a syllable of it. My family and relatives are not German, so there was no understanding of that language through osmosis, and I did not listen to that station even when it's programming was in English, only occasionally when it broadcast classical music.

(Worth considering by xenoglossy investigators is that language osmosis cannot be discounted if it involves French or English in Canada. Each language is everywhere, even in otherwise strongly unilingual areas where people profess total ignorance of the other language and believe it wholeheartedly. This is because of country-wide TV and radio broadcasting in both languages, and because by law, labels, usage directions and safety precautions must be printed in each language — and with equal prominence — on all packaged goods, literally from soup to nuts and from collar labels to car manuals in millions of glove compartments. Areas under federal jurisdiction, such as national parks and some highways, must have bilingual signs. The money is in both languages, too. So I was aware of this pitfall and examined whether it was possible or even likely regarding the German-speaking preacher I heard. It was not.)

Until recently, I could come up with only three other possibilities:

• The speaker switched from English to German in mid-breath and mid-sentence. I consider this unlikely because for the next half hour as I drove home, not a word of English was broadcast, even when a different speaker took over (I was hoping the phenomenon would occur again).

• God hit me over the head with a Tower of Babble miracle to prove his existence (but he had proven that when my car started ;)). And I've lived through more close calls and weird occurrences than I can shake a stick at. Compared to these, if this was a miracle it was bargain-basement.

• Entrapment by the dark side through curiosity, which, considering my age and interests at the time, could not be discounted.

But some months ago through the Finklestein recording, I caught a glimpse of a life hundreds of years ago in the Netherlands. I've read that German and Dutch are not so different that they cannot be mutually understood if spoken slowly, much like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. I assume this would be more likely the farther back in time a date is being considered. Xenoglossy supports the glimpse I had of that life in the Netherlands and neatly fills the hole in the German-preacher incident that has puzzled me for decades.
 
Don't know if this counts, but since childhood, I've been not-quite-singing these sort of wailing little tunes. It always frustrated me that I didn't know the words to them. For years, I thought they sounded vaguely Arabic. Recently, I stumbled across a website that has selections of Ladino music. And that has the right sound. Ladino culture is almost extinct, and the only Sephardi I ever met had converted to Christianity years before, was born in the US and didn't speak Ladino, and had no musical talent that I ever heard.
 
You might want to look up Ian Stevenson's book on xenoglossy, I think it is called Xenoglossy Two Cases of Unlearned Language or something like that. It is available from online bookstores. I agree, if these cases are not contrived, they provided very strong evidence of having learned the language in another life. In the Stevenson examples, one case, I think is somewhat weak. The Gretchen case recounts an English-speaking woman who when under hypnosis, speaks some German. The other case of an Indian girl seems to be much stronger but involves two languages currently spoken in India although one of them is old. Both of the cases have their strengths and weakness I suppose.

I am a proponent of the Patience Worth case as evidence of reincarnation and in that case, while the two languages are both English, they are English separated by 400 - 600 years. Some of the archaic words used by Patience Worth are unlikely to have been known to anyone involved in the case and had to be looked up by language experts to figure them out. Patience's use of medieval English is especially impressive in that it is made up of almost entirely Anglo-Saxon words and it is in the use of that language that the evidence for Patience having lived a life in medieval England is most amazing. Her novellet "Telka" is written entirely in this archaic Anglo-Saxon language, an amazing feat if not impossible for anyone of the 20th century to do, learned or not. (By the way, if anyone has a copy of Telka it is selling online for around $1,200.) I think that the feats of language usage by Patience Worth are beyond belief and suggest that she or her "oversoul" lived in the historical times she wrote about.

Not only did she use this medieval language but she was also able to converse in English dialects of the middle and late part of the 1600s. She also wrote a Victorian novel using the English grammar of that era.

All in all I think that the Patience Worth case is the best documented, most amazing case suggesting reincarnation, eventhough Patience herself disclaimed that anything like reincarnation exists.

Your friend, Wicker
 
I studied French for 6 years in school...

and because I'd spoken it in my PL I had a natural gift for it. I remember my teacher told me once, when my answers were different from everyone else's, that I wasn't wrong, I was more right than anyone else. We learned conversational, modern French; I was using old-fashioned language, more formal than what we'd been taught. I also was head of the class with straight A pluses, and I studied a grand total of one time. I kinda feel like I cheated. :)

Athlynne
 
I find languages very easy to learn and pick up on them quite easily as well. I've looked at words written in both Russian and Hindi and knew what they were, though I don't know how to read in either of those languages.

I've also dreamed in different languages and woken up with strange words in my head that I don't recognize while awake. I've had some help from friends who have translated for me, several words from Polish, Romanian, Gaelic & Hungarian languages.;)

Ailish
 
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