Obscure facts ya know!

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it's also an ergative-absolutive language, where the subject of an intransitive verb is treated like the object of a transitive verb and differently from the subject (agent) of a transitive verb. most IE languages aren't ergative, bur rather nominative accusative.

some sign languages have an ergative structure.

basque may have evolved (or is a vestige of) languages spoken in western europe before the arrivals of PIE speakers. wonderful how they've managed to preserve it that long.

i think basque text looks constructed, like esperanto.

The ergative/transitive/intransitive stuff sounds pretty complex and fascinating - well worth looking into!

The status of Basque as a language outside the IE family might have some parallels with Etruscan in Italy prior to the rise of the Roman civilization.

yeah, i know at least one website describes ergativity and understanding it, as the "maltese falcon of conlanging". to make matters worse, whether or not ergative-absolutive features appear in a language isn't black and white. split ergativity.

dyirbal, an austrailan aboriginal language, uses nominative features for pronouns in which the agent is 1st or 2ns person. 3rd person pronouns are colored ergative-ly.

also, dyirbal is nearly extinct now. it had a grand total of 29 competent speakers calculated in 2006, and young people regularly fail to learn it. linguists like it, anyway.

by some estimates, up to 80% of the world's languages may disappear before the end of this century.

i wish that was obscure to me.

I like to believe that when I get to heaven, all I have to do is drop into the hall of records and find 'em all perfectly preserved and audibly perfect in original condition.

It's times like these that I wish the forums had a "Like" button.

the process of harmonic and subharmonic synthesis [via heterodyning and digital pitch shifting/filtering] constitutes the process termed "revectoring" which is one means of taking old analog recordings and making them sound more wide in frequency range, it adds an octave on each end of the spectrum. on radio call-in programs it is the means by which phone conversations are made to sound less tinny and with greater intelligibility especially with sibilants and thibilants.

Slugs have 4 noses! ("The better to smell you with, my dear!")

A new species of spider has been discovered, and he is SO beautiful!

The researcher who discovered him and another species calls him 'Sparklemuffin'!

If all spiders looked like that, I wouldn't be at all afraid of them. I've lost a lot of my arachnophobia over the years, to the point where I am comfortable putting my nose just an inch or two away from non-poisonous, non-jumping spiders to look at them, but the large, hairy, or poisonous ones still give me the heeby-jeebies. Particularly the poisonous ones, which is how I know it's possible to have a logical phobia.

The Boeing 747 gets about 750 feet of travel per gallon of fuel.

Due to a bad drought killing many trees, the Amazon rainforest now releases more CO2 than it absorbs.

a 700mb/[nominally] 80-minute redbook audio formatted CDR will hold a maximum of 79:54 of audio material, the remaining 6 seconds are reserved for TOC [Table Of Contents] info that enables the CD to be read properly by redbook-compliant CD players.

There is a dinosaur named after Draco Malfoy named the Dracorex Hogwartsia.
Every single piece of matter that makes up all humans can fit inside a cube of sugar.
The most-used name in the world is Muhammed.
Jumping fleas withstand 20 times the amount of g's that a space shuttle accelerating does.

Three of the last four U.S. presidents were left-handed (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush).

Gerald Ford was ambidextrous.

LBJ said ford was "so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time."

There is really only one major parade that is thrown on Canadian Thanksgiving (which is in October). It is televised nationally. It is not a Thanksgiving Day parade.

The dual-cities of Kitchener-Waterloo have a pair of streets: Weber and King. The streets are mostly parallel, but intersect three times. At the south end of Kitchener, King street disappears (it turns into a highway), but Weber continues... until it changes names and becomes King. Both King and Weber have versions in all four cardinal directions; North and South in Waterloo, and East and West in Kitchener.