Linguistic Derivatives
The Legend of the Seven Sleepers has given origin to sjusovare or syvsover (literally a seven-sleeper) to be used in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish to refer to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. It means someone who "sleeps hard and long". The word also is used to mean the hibernating rodent called the edible dormouse.
The words Siebenschläfer in German, zevenslaper in Dutch, hétalvó in Hungarian and sedmispáč in Czech bear a meaning similar to the Scandinavian; they characterize someone who usually sleeps long, waking up later than what is considered necessary or proper.
In Welsh (Cymraeg), a late-riser may be referred to as a saith cysgadur—seven sleeper—as in the 1885 novel Rhys Lewis by Daniel Owen, where the protagonist is referred to as such in chapter 37, p. 294 (Hughes a'i Fab, Caerdydd, 1948). This has the double meaning of one who wakes at seven—well into the working day in a Welsh rural setting.
In the Middle East and specifically in Syria, people say: "نومات أهل فسّو", which can be translated as: "You may sleep like the people of Ephesus".
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“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)