Knitting up the ravelled sleave of care

The more I know of Spanish, the more I enjoy it and appeciate its subtleties, and there are certainly Spanish words and concepts that cannot be adequately expressed in English... but I am convinced that there are many more cases where Spanish lacks a word that really expresses the meaning of an English one (whimsical, for example), or where Spanish bundles up meanings into one word where English has many slightly differing words, often from different roots. I think that in Spanish meaning is less reliant on individual words and more on grammar and context - and the many meanings bound up in single words can be a great source of richness in itself.

Anyway, my oddity of Spanish (as I percieve it) for the day is that the nouns (though not the verbs) for sleep and dream are the same - sueño. Which really is very odd, because I conceptualise them as two very different things. I try not to let my love of the English language prejudice me - after all I'm bound to see the subtleties in English that elude me in Spanish - but it's difficult not to see the lack of two seperate words as, well, a lack.

On a sleepy note, the following aphorism strikes me as pleasing, and quite possibly profound:

There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.