http://kli.org/tlh/sounds.html http://www.halspages.com/smileys/lilspin.gif

Couldn't agree more...


Of course. Those well-known languages of "f" and "g" :P :wink:

No, but Marc Okrand made very sure to keep track of how much he was borrowing from any given human language, so if it leaned too much on one or another he would know to stop and pick another direction. Klingon has the verb at the end of the sentence, for example, which only Russian and I think something Asian does.

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Actually in German, the verb is always in the second position, unless it's preceeded by a model (which is actually a just the subjunctive of a weak verb) or you're talking in the (Imperfekt) past tense, both of which put the verb at the end in its infinitive form. There are a couple other exceptions, I think, like würden which is really just the subjunctive of a weak verb, like the modals.

Pfftt, I hope I explained that correctly. It's so much easier to just speak it than it is to pick apart the grammar, sometimes. http://www.halspages.com/smileys/lilspin.gif

Speaking of word order, Klingon is also very unique in that it always goes object-subject, i.e. object-verb-noun. (Just about every other language keeps it the other way 'round.) Klingon also eiminates quite a few words by turning most pronouns and some adjectives into sufixes and prefixes. Hence, something that could take several words to say in English (i.e. "I hit you hard.") Would be fewer in Klingon (pe'vIl qaqIp.)

Reverse-borrowed from Latin? and Hebrew? I think in Latin, the suffixes on various words indicate the subect to the point where it can be dropped from the sentence, and I seem to recall that in Hebrew, verbs have gender as well as number and tense (i.e., the verb form for "he says" is different from the form for "she says" -- it would be like "he says, she sayes" or something).

Pfft. Suffixes. Anyone can handle that. Now Inuktitut -- there's a language with cojones. It uses infixes.

Gaelic. Mutative consonants make my brain dribble out my ears.

You're right, and the explanation looks good from here. It's just hard for me sometimes to pass up a chance to use a good Mark Twain quote. :wink:

Well, I'm glad another one was caught, although I definitely think we need some sort of structural change to prevent spam, as long as the spammers can spam, we won't be able to capture them all.


Also, by the way I get almost no spam, and what very little spam I get is caught by my spam filter. This is mainly due to the fact I give my email away to only trustworthy sources.


Well, as for a hard language to learn, I don't know from experience, but I've heard Chinese (Mandarin) is one of the hardest.

Why, might you ask?

Well, they say so as it has over 50,000 characters (although you really only absolutely need about 3,000 for everyday life) and that the strokes can get awfully complex:
http://www.omniglot.com/images/writi...e_strokes2.gif

In addition, the tone of the syllable can change the meaning.

In Cantonese, cho can mean "grass" or a half dozen completely unrelated things depending on the pitch given to it by the speaker.

In other words, never teach cantonese to someone who's tone-deaf :P
Seriously, this was supposedly the reason Chairman Mao gave so few speeches towards the end of his life....he had (I think) Parkinsons, and (I'm not too sure on this either) it causes a deadening of speech.....

Can you just imagine trying to write some of those Chinese characters with a blunt pencil? :evil: ;)

5MV - Home of the Kings of OT. :D

What? It was on-topic for at least ten or eleven posts, and then there was another part of a post up there ^ somewhere that was on-topic. :P

Taw-pick? What is this taw-pick you speak of?

Is it linear?

Sa'ar, you see that thing the original post is about? The thing that's in the topic line? That's the topic. They're elusive little buggers, the stay around for an hour or two then BAM! gone. While other forums have gone crazy attempting to keep the topic going strong in it's place, 5MV has allowed for a more natural course, and lets the topic go as it pleases.

It's all very fascinating.

Yes, our topics (and off-topics :)) aren't planned, but rather grow organically from a seed to grow upwards, reaching for the sun, then branch out horizontally into a myriad of forms and eventually release pollen into the great sky of the internet to grow and invade other topics and forums. :D

*Ahem* on the note of the original topic here;

Sympatico DSL= super crap internet, super crap e-mail.
Cogeco T3= super good internet and e-mail, PLUS a firewall that NOTHING can get past.

KillerGM done.

OT: Verbs at the end of the sentence: classical Latin. And verb endings do replace pronouns (veni, vidi, vici).

T: I get no spam at all on my CUNY account. One spam solution is to get your own domain ($9 at godaddy). But you have to keep your address off of web pages.