Nanda?  Waitaminnit...  Zen is confused here....

Chinese is the language where "ma" has like twelve different meanings,
differentiated by *nothing* more than tonality and inflection....

How can you say that there are no inflections?

By comparison, Japanese is positively *monotone*...

Inflections has nothing to do with tone. Chinese is a tone language in that
tone is one of those factors that distinguish the meaning of one word from
another. But, that has nothing to do with inflections.

By "Inflections", we're talking about words that change according to
grammatical sense. "ma" has many different meanings in Chinese, but they
don't change in how they're used, but rather for what they're used for (as
meaning horse, or a question particle). Latin is such an inflected
language:

voco      I say
vocas     you(sing) say
vocat     he/she/it says
vocamus   we say
vocatis   you say
vocant    they say

And so is English in some degree.

Child  Children.
(ie, the "i" in child changes form [ay] to [i])

But in Chinese, this does not happen. "ma" with a sharply rising tone is a
horse. And it retains that tone whenever it means something in the horse
sense.

Chinese is a tonal language (which is right), but it is not inflected. In
fact, its behavior is that of an isolating language, where each word is a
distinct and unalterable unit.

                           ---------------------
-wyrm(AKA Tom Jefferys; Time Lord for Hire, "Have TARDIS; Will Travel.")
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Member of the AFSS          Depraived Kawaii Thing of the First Order, Martin
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