I wonder if Alph the numerix is into linguistics at all?

"Transforms" is another word for rotations (but you all knew that, right?).

An example of a set of transforms in a global frame is the noises humans can make with their larynx - mostly vowel sounds, but some kinds of "tympany" or certain clicking noises, can be made. Then there's the noises a human pharynx can make - the sounds we make when we don't use any "vowel" noise or the string section of the larynx is quiet. These are a bit more varied, with fricatives and sibilants, plosives, glottals, and so on, and there's a wind instrument - whistling.

Put the two together, you get "extra noises", or some of the transforms with the pharyngeal and labial sections are now realisable or "effective", for example the "n" sound, without (that is, as a velar) a bit of humming from the larynx, doesn't have much vocal effect.

There's a set of distinct noises we can all make, though locally we tend toward a subset of these "vocalities", or phonemes. There are about 47 or so recognised "speech" noises we make globally (and whistling a tune isn't considered to be in the set), locally the way these noises are "strung together" (the local map), transforms differently in a connected space (the "listening space"), to other locations (frames) in the global space (frame) of "humans stringing noises together".

For example, the string "itay" transforms into "iday" smoothly in a global sense, but will transform otherwise locally, in another sense. There aren't many meaningful noises you can make with your mouth closed (except for "m"), i.e. with the lips sealed. There is no "velar m".

Vowel noises transform into each other - there's a reason it goes a-e-i, because to get to "i", from "a", you go through "e". That is, you can't say "a-i", or "i-a", without saying "e" in between. "e" also transforms into "y" easily, you can try saying "i-ya" or "ay-i", but "e" shows up every time. Also, there's a phoneme between "i" and "o": the neutral phoneme.

To get to "o" from "i", you pronounce the 'flat-i' sound (like in "bit", or "nitwit"). Although the neutral phoneme "appears" in the middle of aeiou, it should be at the start because it's the most relaxed state for the pharyngeal and laryngeal musculature.

But there isn't really a "start" - "u" transforms into "a", it's a "sound circle", or a kind of (continously transformable) continuum, but then you can go from the "a" sound to the neutral "i" sound, avoiding "e" as long as you don't say the "long i" sound like in "fire".

To which we add the spectrum of percussive and "wind-noise" sounds from the upper manuals, or chambers of the instrument. There's the lower strings and basso, the upper tympany and wind sections, and a resonant chamber (the nasal cavity) with a handy little cover to open and close, for that extra twang. The orchestra sounds a bit dull with the strings damped, but there's a good flute to accompany.

You know how to whistle, dont you...

"Transforms" is another word for rotations (but you all knew that, right?).

"Transforms" can mean a lot of other things besides rotations.

Gimme. Which other things?

My vote is: a rotation is a transform (I'd like to see an example that isn't, though), a transform can be "linear". Does that mean something linearly transformed is not "rotated"? Or is linear just an approximation to some curve or other?

Given that with just the vocal ability from the larynx and the continuum of sound available, and that, with a transformation of the geometry, a surface is seen:

We divide the surface up into an "a-e-i-o-u" map ("y" or "w" are on the "edges" because they both require the pharyngeal geometry to be altered). If you've seen a colour map that lets you select from various hues over it, like in MSPaint (I prefer GIMP - it just seems more utilitarian somehow), the vowel surface must look similar (or can be represented the same way).

It can't be a "flat" surface, because some "hues" require more deformation of the muscles involved, and some are available with a more relaxed geometry. There are hills and valleys that make getting from place to place also a matter of finding a path that follows a local minimum.

Then there's the modulation with the pharyngeal component. Another surface.

And the "listening space" must have symmetrical kinds of surfaces, maps, geometries, transforms, etc, or why bother with a voice or the ability to speak or sing? The equipment looks quite different for the input channel, sure, but that's a mere detail, right?

Gimme. Which other things?

My vote is: a rotation is a transform (I'd like to see an example that isn't, though), a transform can be "linear". Does that mean something linearly transformed is not "rotated"? Or is linear just an approximation to some curve or other?

How about mirror imaging? You can't get it by rotation.

Others are scale changes, stretching in one dimension leaving others fixed, etc.

You can't get a mirror image by rotation?
Not sure I can agree completely with that. Why is a mirror image reversed? What about chiral molecules, that's a geometrical rearrangement (I think you can call such a thing a transform).

Scaling isn't rotating, in a strict sense, Scaling is "kind of" a rotation. Everything is "kind of" a rotation, or circularity is everywhere, instead of nice straight lines.

Is "scaling" a number by "multiplying" it by -1, a rotation or not?

Yeah, "everything" is "kind of" rotation.

Ok, time to open a can of linguistic whoop-ass.

The word "rotate", arrives intact (more or less) from the Roman Empire - those Romans!

If you can speak Latin, you know that to say "it rotates", is "rotat".
And that the verb comes from the noun for a wheel, or rota, rotae f. (a potter's wheel); rotar, or "at the wheel" transitivises the noun, as usual in Latin, and the verb is given in most dictionaries as: roto, rotare, rotavi, rotatus sum; "I rotate, to rotate, to have rotated, I am rotating (am a rotation)". It also means: "to revolve, to turn about, to roll."

So now you know.

Vokthii, I enjoyed your OP. and as far as I can tell all you said is true, but I would like to add a few comments and clarifications (I will do it from memory more than 25 years old, so may not have the terms correct):

First no language makes use of all the production flexibility humans have for speech. Each of most of the distinct sound segments (I think phonemes is their name) can be broken down into a more fundamental characteristics. (about 6 to 8, I forget correct number) You mention a few of these. (Do they still indicate the sound of “b” by notation < b > or was it /b/ ? again I forget.) I will use /b/ for that here.
For example the sound “b” or /b/ and /p/ differ only {as I recall} in one of these characteristics. I.e. /b/ is “voiced.” And /p/ is not but both are plosives etc.

Thus if you are making a speech synthesers the task is reasonable easy. It needs, at least for western, if not all modern society languages on to be able to make these 6 to 8 characteristics. (They have a name for them, other than ”characteristic,” but I forget that too.) As you pointed out, to get to /i/, from /a/, you go through /e/ of the amplitude of the 6 to 8 independently controlled “characteristics that the speech syntheser can make are varied thru /e/ as they continuously change for the setting that make a standard /a/ change into a standard /i/.

Now here is what really interested me in this:

Where the continuously variable sound set that will be heard as /a/ becomes /e/ is quite a sharp transition and almost exactly the same point for all humans (an surprisingly at the same point for guinea pigs too!)*
The vowel boundaries are innate – not learned!

Another thing very interesting is that although you are born with the capacity to produce and hear as distinct a much larger set of phonemes than your language will use, you lose this ability to even hear the difference between two phonemes that differ by only one or two of these basic characteristic at quite an early age (when I also forget) for example if there were no word in your native tongue, say English, that differed on by fact that one had the /b/ and the other the /p/ sounds, but in language Y there were such words that differed only this way and you were listening to the speakers of language Y say these words one after the other you cannot even hear any difference.

I know this is hard to believe but it is true. I was, late in my career, (with full pay) free for a year to do whatever I liked at JHU. I chose to spend it with graduate students and professors of the cognitive science department, which was at that time under Alphonzo Caramazzi, (who later went to Harvard to head up their language department). As it happened there were two natives of India as graduate students and Hindu language does have some different words where the only difference is phonemes characteristics set not present in English.

We ran a test on them. A list of about 30 total of one pair of these word pairs (15 each randomly ordered in the list) was constructed. One girl read the list to the other, sitting on the other side of a large table with about 20 of us non Hindi speakers listen also. I tried for first few words read to write 1 or 2 down when I thought one or the other of the words was said, but soon gave up – the reading girl was just repeating the same word 30 times as far as I or any of the rest of us could hear. When she finished reading the 30 words we took the list the other Indian girl had written down and compared to the list that had been read – it was disgusting - not one error! No one in the room other than the Indian girl writing the words (one of the two words spoken) down had ever heard any sound difference.

I guess my point relating to your comments on the transform of speech sounds made to sounds heard is that it is partly an innate functional transform and all humans are identical at birth but the transforms you can make later as an adult differ.

----------------
*You first need to train them with standard /a/ to push the red button to get the food pellet the blue button if std /e/ is sounded etc. (yellow for std /i/ ) but the std /a/ is far from the /a/../e/ boundary where all humans and guinea pigs switch from hearing an /a/ to hearing an /e/ etc.

/b/ is “voiced.” And /p/ is not but both are plosives As I recall, the way to say that in linguist-speak is: p is a velar plosive, b isn't velar, but is a plosive (or a "voiced" plosive).

Interestingly, the origin of "velar" (Latin, natch), is to do with covering, or an awning or veil ("to veil" comes from the same root).
A "vel" is a conjunctive in Latin ("perhaps", or "as you will", and it's pronounced "well", of course, it's the same word we use, only very slightly altered in use). A velamen, is a covering, a velum is a sail or curtain, and the transition to velar (at the covering) goes to velare - to cover or conceal, and vellare (the "ll" is trilled), to pick up, pluck or uproot; also to sail (use the cover), is velificare; haste or speed is velocitas (a journey "from the cover").

And with the vowel-map or surface, could it be said that, apart from the particular movements of laryngeal and pharyngeal components to modulate it, could "distinct" vowels be mixtures of others? Say, an "e" is like a mixture of 50% "a" and 50% "i", or some other kind of "mixing". As you can produce the colour yellow on a TV with red, blue, and green frequencies, by mixing them together?

Except that, as you say, after 'conditioning', the surface becomes deformed in a "set" pattern, ruled by the particular phonemic "language-house" (I was going to say linguistic frame, but that means something like: "you have a German spear for a tongue", and I don't want to alarm any Romans out there).

There aren't many meaningful noises you can make with your mouth closed (except for "m"), i.e. with the lips sealed. There is no "velar m".If you seal your lips and hum, and then move your tongue and the rest of your speech organs in exaggerated motions, you get a sound like Peter Frampton's guitar with the voice box. You might be able to understand somebody talking that way if you study it for a while.

It's one step beyond what ventriloquists do.

Did you already know that the vowel boundaries, etc. are innate, but if not used early in youth are lost? If you did perhaps you can state what I tried to more accurately.

I was meaning to get a bit further into the mapping side of the surfaces that appear, as sound, or the input that sees the output, as it were.

So, that means, because I only know about Latin (and something of the influence of Greek on it), it will be "Latin rhythms 101", but I do this sort of crappy thing for the following reasons: 1) I have time on my hands; 2) I learned Latin for 3 years, and got to the point of "thinking Latin", or not having to apply my native map. The way it got taught wasn't what I would now call "absorbing" or maybe even "inspiring" - you sort of had to find your own inspiration, and to a large extent, your own way, so I thought I might review, somewhat, the approach and if there is an "easier Latin" rather than the somewhat stultified one they deliver at high schools.

Anyways, to start: a casual glance through a pocket Latin-English reference opens up certain key elements of the language, if you do a bit of thesaurising, or should that be thesaurutor?

The first entry is usually "a, ab, abs", which is a preposition - "at, by, in respect of", pronounced as in "cat". But the sound is also discovered at the end of words; at the beginning of a word that it's been prefixed, or preposed to, it changes the word to mean: "at the ...", "in respect of the ...".

The verb dico, dicere means: "to pronounce, to say", prepose "ab", you get abdico, abdicere: to resign, i.e. to "pronounce by".
When it goes at the end of a noun, it changes the word to mean: "at the/by the ...", and gets an "r", (a labial) instead of the plosive or plosive+sibilant consonantal bracket. The vowel changes in tone as well, to a long "a", as in "art".

Next up, "e" (pronounced "ey", or "ay"), means: "from, out of", and gets a "x", or velar+sibilant added as a bracket. It can also mean: "in respect of", so the two sounds can swap meaning (but not if you're a Roman who speaks Classical Latin), but they remain distinctive. It gets used like the short "a" with verbs (preposing) and nouns (suffixing, or locating "after the fact").

To verbalise a noun add the "ey" sound, as in "dik" - "dik-ey"; dice is the vocative-imperative ("Speak!") of the verb dicere. Note how the inifinitives are formed by adding the "re" suffix. The word re(s), rei means: "thing, circumstance, reality, case", so the verb dicere decomposes into: "dic"+"e"+"re", or "talking"+"in respect of"+"the thing" - i.e. pronouncing.

So there are two key vowel sounds that appear to be used consistently to signify place, or relation. The short "a" sound as in "at", has a linguistic sense in Latin it still has today - to be at, to be near. The long "e" sound means: "to come out of, to be caused or brought about by", and is the usual vocative form at the end of imperative (plural) verbs.

With the actual production of either sound, there's also a common geometry, they transform into each other, or they are closely-spaced on the phonic surface.

Starting with the mouth slightly opened, the throat and tongue relaxed, sounding the vocal chords produces the "lowest" on the available "colour surface", which should, for the average human, be the neutral phoneme "[ə]" (actually, this is a phone, that represents different phonemes, in different localities), which would, or should, vary globally less between younger, or less conditioned equipment, than older, more conditioned phonic apparatus, a sound-synthesiser that has been trained, or entrained, into the local dialectic patterns, the phonemic algebra and geometry.

It should be the same phone that the user has for a "m" phoneme, with the mouth closed - one of the first that humans learn to make, is the "neutral consonant". It should work for "n" too, because it uses the same laryngeal configuration, apart from the upper chamber.

So, if there's anyone who can report that, no, when they say "mmm", then open their mouth slightly (so as not to deform any other surface and modulate the phone), the "short i", as in "hit" doesn't happen (although I know Aussies modulate this word, or say something like "heet" instead, hopefully most understand: "with the throat and tongue relaxed"). So no modulation, just a noise. (or if you happen to be 'phoning someone, you can ask them what they think...)

Next: making up words and stuff.

So being born means you're equipped with a means of getting attention, which at the early stages, is really all it's about.
You're born with the ability to make mostly the "ah", or "wah", kind of sound - the short and long a. Both vowel sounds start with the relaxed geometry of the neutral phone(me), and transform into each other via the rear of the tongue moving laterally to deform the shape of the upper larynx and lower pharynx - the front of the tongue moves forward too. If you start with the more relaxed sound, or long a, as in "rather", or "artist", then poke out your tongue, the rear of the pharyngeal chamber gets progessively "squeezed" and the tone of the "a" sound changes. This is how to transform a long into a short a as in "at" (not by poking out your tongue, by moving the back of it, and so having to "fold up" the front part a little).

Apart from infants making both these phones audible (particularly to any females nearby who might be able to respond), they also make lots of "m" noises, at first. So the first noises babies make globally are "m" and "a" sounds, or "mama" sounds. If a baby is making the "ma,ma(t)!", or "wawa(t)" noises with the tongue forward (the short a phone), it's a familiar "feed me!" wail, or it's the usual way an infant communicates want or need. An infant is saying (as loudly as it can usually manage): "my tongue wants something, listen, I'm poking it out!"

The other kinds of sounds that babies make are just the open breathing, or "h", that isn't really a sound, more a gap in the output. Babies wail or cry by expelling air (as "hhh"), then vocalising, so that's sort of "haha", or "ha(d)," at varying amplitude and breathing rate. So the short "a" isn't all that big a surprise as the noise that means "where I am", i.e. it signifies an individual location, or "at-ness".

The other vowels don't start to appear until a bit of familiarisation with the capabilities. Babies learn how to "drive" their voices, and usually learn how to make the "ay" noise next, or it's the first to be accumulated into the phonic set, next to the short e, "a", the w and h. Babies make sort of "proto" syllable noises too: almost-t and -d sounds, sort-of b and p noises. Gurgling is training the glottis (which is important for making "g" and "ng" sounds, and "k"), apart from the standard biological function.

Labial phones, where the tongue surface moves against the front of the palate, or is also a palatal, come later after a bit of learning how to explore the "inner" geometry with it, as well as all the "outer" geometry they explore , tasting and instinctive immune-system stimulating they need to do. Soon enough, they're making recognisable sounds and obviously beginning to learn to speak, or they start to make their first tentative steps at declaring their ability to do so.

They say stuff pretty much like: "Hi, here I am", although it doesn't come out like that at first. They reach the point of beginning to form what the psychologists call a "theory of mind" - by the age of three or so, they will be able to recognise a mirror image of themselves. From being able at birth, to only poke their tongue forward and make their larynx "work", they've begun to master and understand their own and other voices, and what it means to have one.

Next up, "e" (pronounced "ey", or "ay"), means: "from, out of", and gets a "x", or velar+sibilant added as a bracket.The Latin root word is ex, "out" or "out of." X is a rather fragile phoneme in Latin and is often lost, as in ex degrading into e, or transformed, as in rex, regina and pax, pace.
Dice is the vocative-imperative ("Speak!") of the verb dicere. Note how the inifinitives are formed by adding the "re" suffix. The word re(s), rei means: "thing, circumstance, reality, case", so the verb dicere decomposes into: "dic"+"e"+"re", or "talking"+"in respect of"+"the thing" - i.e. pronouncing.You can't deconstruct an infinitive quite that far. The infinitive endings are are, ere, ire. The vowel identifies which of the three paradigms the verb belongs to and stays with the verb more or less throughout its adventures in conjugation--more with regular verbs, less with the irregulars. Amare, amas, amatis, amant, amavi, amans. I've never seen any attempt to attach a meaning to the vowel in the infinitive. Dicere is quite irregular, with the preterit dixit providing another illustration of the fragility of the X phoneme. Dicere has degraded further in the Romance languages. The Spanish preterit is dijo, the subjunctive diga, the Portuguese preterit is disse and the Italian imperative is dite. The C has vanished completely from the French infinitive dire and the Spanish future dirá.

Yes, all that would probably be in keeping with Latin verb phonology, as most understand it.

Nonetheless, if instead of starting with classifying them according to how an adult population has learned to do it, if you start at the actual start, certain key noises can be discerned that appear to have a "standard intent", when they are voiced.

The short "a" means "position of me", and in Latin, the vowel is relaxed, by adding "r", and any "thing word" has "ar" suffixed to it, which then implies "at the thing". It is a fairly easy pattern to find. It's a key phone, in a global kind of sense, and not just in Latin.

The "a" sounds are the first two that humans are born with, so they become a way of identifying "self-ness" or "thing-ness". The other half of that is "things that do things", or have "things done to them".

The "ay" implies an effect or cause, or "something that you get from", a thing. Like I note, verbs with the -ere suffix are formed from noun roots, and mean "out of". Haven't got as far as the -ire verbs, the "ee" and neutral phones are adjuncts too. In Latin, as Italian, the neutral phone has a slight "ee" in it, like Aussies give it, usually.


You can't deconstruct an infinitive quite that far.Maybe, but that sort of little detail hasn't stopped me before.::p

OK, so, as noted, there are three ways to make a verb in Latin: by adding a positional suffix ("the thing is here"): -ar, to get the -are verbs (the first conjugation), add -er (an extensional suffix: "it comes from") to get -ere verbs (the second and third conjugation), and -ir (a translational suffix: "it goes") to get -ire verbs (conjugation four). The endings can be pronounced as a short or long vowel, of course. The -ar verbs have a long a, the -er verbs use both (the second conjugation has the long e, and the third uses the short e). The fourth uses both the long i ("ee"), and the neutral, or short i sound.

The -ire verbs are formed by suffixing (a form of) the verb "to go". For example the verb audire: to listen, to hear, is "au"+"d"+"ire". The au(d)- root has a general meaning in Latin of: "daring, boldness, impudence"; as a standalone word (an interjection): "au!", means "oh!" in Latin (actually, we say the same word but spell it a different way, we say "eh?" and "hey" too, they used to say it more like "au(w)".).
Add a consonant and the meaning alters. So the verb decomposes into "daring to go", or somesuch - i.e. "having the boldness to be there", type of thing.

So that, to me, is how Latin gets its verb forms. There are the key sounds we make (from birth), that have key meanings in language. The neutral i phone is where any vowel sound we make starts from (even if it isn't voiced). It isn't really surprising that the phone has a verbal meaning (in Latin) of "go".

The personal endings of Latin verbs - first, second and third person - use a consistent pattern across all four verb forms, and the irregular verbs have an obvious connection to that.

So that, to me, is how Latin gets its verb forms. There are the key sounds we make (from birth), that have key meanings in language.Your hypothesis has to be consistent with the enormous body of research conducted by the last several generations of linguists, particularly the recent studies using massively parallel computing to find correlations that could not be uncovered by generations of traditional scholarship.

The disparate grammars of the Indo-European languages reveal descent from a well-established, highly detailed paradigm in the original language. Specifically, the inflected forms of conjugated verbs can be traced back to common ancestors before the Indo-European diaspora. A comparison of the inflections of one tense in three languages hints at this discovery:Latin: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant Russian: govoryu, govorish, govorit, govorim, govorite, govoryat German: denke, denkst, denkt, denken, denkt, denken (No, these are not the same verb, just compare the inflections.)You need to examine these studies in more detail and make sure your hypotheses cover the origins of the elements in question in our ancestal language. We already know that Latin words were not formed onomatopoetically from the sounds made by Roman babies; they were inherited from the Indo-European tribe who migrated out of Asia, and underwent many phonetic shifts along the way.

Your hypothesis must go back at least to the babies born a couple of thousand years before the Romans set foot in Europe.

Of course the Latin language didn't form because Roman babies made noises. English didn't wait for newborns to start making sounds so its speakers could make up a language....?

We already know that Latin words were not formed onomatopoetically from the sounds made by Roman babies; Did Indo-European babies make any noise? Or the babies who were born to their ancestors?

If that's the conclusion you've reached, then I think you may have missed the point completely. English babies make noises too, so do Russian babies. The point is - all modern newborns make noises that must be very close (possibly identical) to the noises babies made, say 10,000 years ago, for instance.

I'm not really sure what I might now offer to assist with any misconception, so, therefore, I believe I might just ignore it completely, in return, ok?

If you take the "model", such as it is, for a drive through a Latin dictionary, it does appear to hold together. I know Latin wasn't the first language on the planet, too BTW.

I've noted that the only linguistic insights I have are with Romance languages. Roman culture does have a pretty big cross-section, in terms of influence on non-Roman cultures in most of what passed for civilisation. It dominates the language we're using here, innit?

I think one of the more interesting ways to look at a language is to look at "everyday" words, and words for common kinds of food - like how the word "fish" transforms into "fisch" or "fizh" then "fich", which sort of drops into "fig". The front end transforms too, into "vish", then "bish" then "dish". A dish of figs, or fish?

Any hoo, if I follow my own rough-and-ready guide to it, and starting with the -ire verbs, see how far it gets. The neutral phone must have a common thread through all languages, even where it sometimes inverts its meaning. The sound might associate with "being somewhere" rather than "going somewhere" as in the Romantic frame of reference. Latin uses it in the sense of commuting something from somewhere, other languages may invert this to mean associating, instead.

(Hint: anyone who feels they can feel free to do so, at this juncture, is free to offer examples of other ways the sound is framed, than the translational (of objects, not foreign language) meaning it gets in the Graeco-Roman one).

So looking up the string "ire" in a computerised lexicon (which has it's own internal algebra and unique heuristics), you get:

i.re V 6 1 PRES ACTIVE INF 0 X
i.re V 6 1 PRES PASSIVE IND 2 S
eo, ire, ivi(ii), itus V [XXXAX]
go, walk; march, advance; pass; flow; pass (time); ride; sail;

ir.e N 3 3 LOC S M
ir.e N 3 3 DAT S M Early
ir.e N 3 3 ABL S M
iris, iris N (3rd) M [XAXFO] veryrare
hedgehog;

ir.e N 3 3 LOC S F
ir.e N 3 3 DAT S F Early
ir.e N 3 3 ABL S F
Iris, Iris N (3rd) F [XYXCO]
Iris (messenger of the gods, goddess of the rainbow); rainbow;

iris, iris N (3rd) F [XAXCO]
iris (plant)i; preparation of iris root; iridescent stone;

Ignoring the stuff inside the square brackets for the now, you can see there are a few ways the word gets used. The God's name has a direct connection to the idea of conveying a message; the plant's name, and the stone's are the natural, or external "pre-existing" connection. The -is suffix is the personal second, or "you", which gives the abstract noun: "Iris" the meaning: "conveying (a/the) message of you", where "you" is the externalised personality, i.e. "nature".

So have I at least made it to the corner? Hey, look, there's a pointer in that dictionary reference, the way the verb "to go" is transformed into "I go".

Eo is the conjunction of the "ey" sound (from, out of) and the "o" sound. "O!" signifies individual action in Latin.

Before going further with the test run, I might just do a reality check because so far, the whole thing is stuck on the Italian peninsula. I mean, before the Romans became more than just another tribe and conquered a few local regions, there was the Hellenistic empire that Alexander "conquered" into existence, and the Hellenisation of cultures around the Mediterranean.

So, reality checks these days, internet-wise mean looking up stuff in wikipedia. Nope, no directly obvious stuff that says: "Greek used the neutral phone to signify translocation".

However, there's a river, the Issus river, across which I will make a leap by saying: the name is onomatopoietic, and the name is also the name of an abstraction for the river "going", i.e. a deity, like the Latin Iris. So far, so real. Greek appears to be the language that Romans got the "go" sound from.

Modern languages, in the Romance group, must still adhere to this paradigm, although there has been time for inversions and reversions, the semantic area might be a bit more stretched on the modern frame.

English is Germanic, but has been influenced twice: the Romans brought their culture with them and an early Brythonic language became a Latin dialect. This was replaced, to a large extent, by the languages the Vikings, Saxons, Celts, Franks and others brought with them. Then a second Roman influence: the Norman dialect became ascendant. So English is a Celt-Brytho-Latin-Saxon-Norman (mostly) language. Five big flavours in the mix.

This is how the verbal forms of ire are derived, or conjugated as they say; for some reason this is one of the last you learn "how to deal with", and the conjugations are usually learned one by one.

Present tense: "goes"

(ir)eo, (ire)imus
(ire)is, (ire)itis
(ire)it, (ir)eunt

the "ire" at the front is implicit, i.e. an apostrophe. Each form decomposes (in my lexicon) into "the thing that goes from", followed by the sound that signifies person; the plurals are extended versions, in some sense. The transition in number from "I" to "we" is usually from the 'o' sound to the 'm' sound. In Latin, the -us phoneme was more of a "w", something like the way French speakers say the 'u' in "tu", a 'w' phone with a touch of "u" in it. The 's' at the end was usually elided, except to maintain speech rhythm. So the -us sort of "isn't there", it's implicit though.

Latin verbs always form the second person with a sibilant stop: "s", sometimes pronounced with a slight "zsh" sound, like we sometimes voice the 's' too. The present tense uses the "ee" phone (followed by the neutral phone for the pluralised form). So "you go" in Latin is: "ees, eetis", depending on whether you mean one "you" or more than one "you".

The third person has a 't' which is right next to 's', on the palatal surface. The 'r' 's' 't', and "ch" "zh", also 'd' and 'n' phones are adjacent. So are 'o' and 'm'.

Think Italian when you speak Latin words and it's pretty close.

Next step, how do you use the verb to mean "should/would go/be going", how do you change the meaning to signify a conditional sense, i.e. the subjunctive? A use of verbs in this sense in Latin, of requiring a connection to be made - i.e.: "if we get there on time, we will/should sail with the tide", "if the weather is fine, it will not be a problem", etc.

The present subjunctive, again starting with the same construction, is:

(ir)eam, (ir)eamus
(ir)eas, (ir)eatis
(ir)eat, (ir)eant

The 'ey' is retained and the 'tense' phone changes from "ee" to a short 'a' in the singular and long 'a' in the plural forms, except for the 3rd plural person, where it gets contracted before the nasal "n" (the "t" is barely sounded).
The "a" sounds imply presence, or they are positional or locative noises. In other words, they change the verb to mean "it goes from (being) at", it depends or is subjunctive to the presence, or situation of the verb's person. The first person singular adapts the 'm', or the "we" phone, also.

Note: my "model" assumes there are only three kinds of verbs in Latin: locative, or "at" verbs, associative, or "near" verbs, and translational, or "go" verbs. Associative verbs get two conjugations in Latin, for which I imagine there must have been some linguistic requirement.

If anyone knows of examples of languages that have kinds, than the three in my Latin bag of tricks, of verbs that use some other sense, that would be interesting.

In Latin, the -us phoneme was more of a "w", something like the way French speakers say the 'u' in "tu", a 'w' phone with a touch of "u" in it.Where did you get this from? Everything I've read says that Classical Latin had only cardinal vowels, with maybe a slack or "short" version of a couple of them. Vulgar Latin developed more short vowels, but it did not have the umlaut you describe. Of the Romance languages only French has umlauts, and that's just a vestige of the overlay of the Germanic language of the Franks, like the uvular R and the preference for the present perfect over the preterit. Latin split off into a large number of languages, so anything that happened in Latin usually survived in at least one of them.
The 's' at the end was usually elided, except to maintain speech rhythm. So the -us sort of "isn't there", it's implicit though.Again, where did you get that? The S at the end of verb suffixes is still there in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, and also (IIRC) Occitan and Romanian. French still has the spelling, indicating that it's a rather recent loss.

Only Italian has lost that final S and it has lost all final S's--as well as other final consonants. There are only a handful of Italian words ending in R, L or N, and AFAIK only lapis ends in S.
Latin verbs always form the second person with a sibilant stop: "s", sometimes pronounced with a slight "zsh" sound, like we sometimes voice the 's' too.Once again, where are you picking up these thing? I'm not a professional linguist but I've been an enthusiastic amateur for more than fifty years and this goes against everything I have read. Even intervocalic S was not voiced in Vulgar Latin because it's not voiced in Spanish, Catalan or Romanian. At some point it began being voiced in the speech of Italy, but by that time it was the language we call early Italian, not late Latin.
Think Italian when you speak Latin words and it's pretty close.But that's dangerous. When the various city-states decided to unite and create an Italian nation in the 19th century they had to make many compromises in assimilating their disparate dialects into a standard Italian language. It's hard to say whether any particular phenomenon in Italian is a direct descendant of Latin, or just the work of a committee trying not to show favoritism.

OK, there seems to be some disagreement here about how Latin speakers actually said things.
The -us "noise", at the end of nouns (and anywhere else), was, as far as I learned, either spoken as a "ws", or elided, depending on the meter the speaker was using. That's Latin 101.

The sibilant was elided from nouns, but not from verb forms that were a 2nd person.

Italian - the modern language - is recognised today as having the closest pronunciation (closest phonology) to the original Latin.

But that's only some stuff I was taught - it could all be a bunch of crap, for all I know. Mind you, it has seemed to line up with the actual Latin I read, which isn't really the same as hearing a Classical speaker, maybe.

The very first verb I learned about, and the first time I heard the word "conjugate", was the verb amare: to love, to like, to be "obliged to".
Since I'm driving, I say let's have a look at the old noun: amor.

Well, obviously the noun and the verb start with the same sound "am". This means: "at us", or "our". Add the "or" noise which means: "my thing/going" (generally) to make it a noun, which gives "my going to us", or "our and my thing", sort of.

The verb amare gets the "ar" sound added - the locative noise again. So now it's: "at our thing/going". The infinitive (person or tense) has the "out of, from" sound at the end, or "concerning (at) our going from" - to be obliged, IOW.

The heuristics I'm using say that the personal endings in Latin have key sounds. The "o" sound implies "I/me/my", the "m" implies "we/us/our", the "s" implies "you/your", and the "t" "he/him/his she/her/hers it/its", the "n" is "they/them/their". Or perhaps these "rules of linguistic thumb", may fall over when confronted with some real Latin prose, say from the Medieval or Classical eras.
Let's see:
"
IMPERATORIS THEODOSII CODEX

LIBER PRIMUS
GESTA SENATUS ROMANI DE THEODOSIANO PUBLICANDO
TITULI EX CORPORE THEODOSIANO
LIBER 1

CTh.1.1.0. De constitutionibus principum et edictis

CTh.1.1.1 [=brev.1.1.1]
Imp. Constantinus a. ad Lusitanos. Si qua posthac edicta sive constitutiones sine die et consule fuerint deprehensa, auctoritate careant. Dat. VII. kal. aug. Sabariae, Probiano et Iuliano vv. cc. coss.
"

A selection from an old Latin document: the Codex Imperatoris, of a Roman Emperor, presented to the Senate, like way back.

Ignoring the titles, and going straight for the first para, the emperor of the day, is Constantinus, (Imp. is an abbr. for Imperator) who's got an "o" in the first syllable of his name. Lusitanos has one in the last syllable, constitutiones, and consule, auctoritate, Probiano, Iuliano, and the abbreviated coss.

So can these words be decomposed the same way. What about the other kinds of sounds, and the way verbs are formed; does the model hold together?

I occasionally look here, but do not find much that interests me. I am not interested in the origins and evolution of words - (I.e. the "pre-Chomsky" linguistics).

I am quite interested in the aspects of language that are innate (common to all languages humans speak, even the sign language of the deaf!) One aspect of this innate or genetic controlled potential does touch on some of the things Vkothii is posting.

Namely post birth there is considerable continuing development in the human anatomy for the speech production system. A baby can simultaneously breathe and nurse (swallow) but an adult cannot. I forget the proper names, but the flap that is closed in the adult swallowing and open when breathing undergoes very significant migration, under control of the genes, which govern all physical development. Thus the nature of the sounds most easily made does change. Perhaps one of you may state this better, as my memory on this is very rusty.

I forget the proper names, but the flap that is closed in the adult swallowing and open when breathing undergoes very significant migrationThat's the glottis, the flap that covers the tracheal opening when we swallow. We use it to make 'k', 'ng', and 'g' noises, and there's the Germanic 'kh/gh' sound, and the 'h', and there's the glottal stop, like in Cockney, where words like "bottle" get pronounced "boh-il".

How about that: I just got waylaid by a HK up the road (it's actually mid-afternoon here), and ended up scoring a book with some Sanskrit phonemes in the back. So now I can see what the "Krishna school" thinks the pronunciation (not the meaning) of distinct sounds in that language were. Sanskrit was derived from the same proto-Indo-Euro line as Greek and Latin.

The meanings and another ref. are in the wiki for comparison, and I also get a Sanskrit copy of part of the Mahabaratha, to peruse for language constructs, along with the translations (from one school of thought). Which, being skeptical of, I won't assume is a verbatim representation, as such. Or I will at least assume some artistic license has been applied.

I'm gonna go straight out on to a limb here and say: the "da" sound in Sanskrit signifies something like "move, go, the force behind".

The sanskritic "ve-da", translates as: "knowledge of (the) meaning", or more generally, as "form, knowledge"; the essence of something (such as the flow of a river, or the movement of wind, and the tides), is equated with the perception of it, the knowledge is the form.

The "da" became the neutral phone in Greek and Latin, that signifies the same kind of meaning. The "da" was lost in Greek and became "don", from which e.g. Poseidon, or was dropped from the deitic names of things like rivers and winds, and so on.

OK, there seems to be some disagreement here about how Latin speakers actually said things. The -us "noise", at the end of nouns (and anywhere else), was, as far as I learned, either spoken as a "ws", or elided, depending on the meter the speaker was using. That's Latin 101.That sounds like Latin 101 the way they teach it in England, where the letters are pronounced as if they were English, with the single exception of meticulously pronouncing V as W. They pronounce vere like English "weary." If your schoolmasters are your only authority on Latin pronunciation, I have my doubts. As I said, we can deduce a lot about a dead language by its living descendants, and there's abundant evidence in the prolific Romance language family that Vulgar Latin had fairly straight vowels, with only a difference in length and perhaps tension.
Italian - the modern language - is recognised today as having the closest pronunciation (closest phonology) to the original Latin.By the Popes, perhaps. They pronounce pace as if it were Italian: PA-chay. We deduce that the C had softened to an S sound in Vulgar Latin because none of the Romance languages inherited hard C before I and E. But three of them retain the S sound and Spanish has the bizarre TH. Only Italian and Romanian got the CH, which implies that that sound is a very late development, after the downfall of the Empire when one language had split into dialects that each went their own way. On the balance, I'd say the Italian truly does preserve more of the original Latin phonetics than its cousins, but in truth that's not saying much since it's come a long way from Virgil.
The heuristics I'm using say that the personal endings in Latin have key sounds. The "o" sound implies "I/me/my", the "m" implies "we/us/our", the "s" implies "you/your", and the "t" "he/him/his she/her/hers it/its", the "n" is "they/them/their". Or perhaps these "rules of linguistic thumb", may fall over when confronted with some real Latin prose, say from the Medieval or Classical eras.But your hypothesis is about generic human instincts, so it should hold for other language families, and it doesn't. "I" is ani in Hebrew and ane in Arabic, it's ngwo in Ancient Chinese, and it's watakushi in Japanese.
I am quite interested in the aspects of language that are innate (common to all languages humans speak, even the sign language of the deaf!) One aspect of this innate or genetic controlled potential does touch on some of the things Vkothii is posting.I think that we already know the extent of the influence of human speech physiology and psychology on phonetics: All languages draw their vowels and consonants from the same set. It's the set that babies in all parts of the world have been recorded to babble as they experiment with their speech organs. Some require more practice to master, like the clicks of San and the palatalized Ř of Czech, so by chance very few languages hang onto them and most babies don't get them reinforced and forget how to do them. The first thing babies figure out how to do is pop their lips open and shut while either nasalizing or vocalizing, so MAMA and PAPA are the first "words" they form. But I'm not sure we can read much more than that into the paleo-meanings of morphemes.
A baby can simultaneously breathe and nurse (swallow) but an adult cannot. I forget the proper names, but the flap that is closed in the adult swallowing and open when breathing undergoes very significant migration, under control of the genes, which govern all physical development.Almost all mammals can do that. Humans are unique, or nearly so, in our inability to breathe and swallow simultaneously.
That's the glottis, the flap that covers the tracheal opening when we swallow. We use it to make 'k', 'ng', and 'g' noises, and there's the Germanic 'kh/gh' sound, and the 'h', and there's the glottal stop, like in Cockney, where words like "bottle" get pronounced "boh-il".Don't forget the R of Brazilian Portuguese. Some northern French speakers come pretty close to that too.
The "da" was lost in Greek and became "don", from which e.g. Poseidon, or was dropped from the deitic names of things like rivers and winds, and so on.You're deconstructing beyond the bottom level of reality again. Gotta watch that. The Greek morpheme is -on and it's quite common after practically any consonant, e.g., epsilon, Agamemnon.

The Greek morpheme is -on and it's quite common after practically any consonant, e.g., epsilon, Agamemnon.That looks like a Greek morpheme, for sure.
What does the -on signify? Does it have something to do with movement?
Why does Greek have a "i" sound in front of the names for certain things?

Of course, the Italian language sounds only something like Classical Latin would have. Nonetheless, the consensus, I think you'll find, is that it is the closest phonologically. So "think Italian" isn't really bad advice.

I also am sticking to my guns about the final -us morpheme that singular nouns, people's names, and so on, had at the end (i.e. as a suffix).
It was pronounced much like the way French speakers say the u in "tu", once again. The sibilant was optional, barely sounded, unless needed to bracket the next word. Though most high school teachers tell you to pronounce it "oos", it's actually more like "ews", but barely heard.

That looks like a Greek morpheme, for sure.
What does the -on signify?It means, "This is a noun." And it also tell us the gender, although I don't know which one. The plural forms in -a, as in phenomenon/phenomena.
Does it have something to do with movement?It doesn't have anything to do with anything. It's just an inflection telling us the noun is in the nominative case. You keep trying to deconstruct things that aren't there.
Why does Greek have a "i" sound in front of the names for certain things?You mean like ion and iambos? Once again, you're trying to deconstruct things that don't come apart. That I is part of the morpheme, it's not a separate unit. There are only a certain number of phonemes in any language and they fall together in ways that match the phonetic patterns of the language. In English we have lot of words that start with ST but none that start with FT. But that doesn't imply that the S "means something." It's just a combination of sounds that comes together because it's relatively easy to pronounce for us, whereas FT is not. The Slavic languages and most of the other Germanic languages have a number of words that start with KN, but English does not. We inherited those words, but the K is silent because the peculiarities of the path English development was taking made it hard for us to pronounce the KN combination.
Of course, the Italian language sounds only something like Classical Latin would have. Nonetheless, the consensus, I think you'll find, is that it is the closest phonologically.I think you're right, but as I said, it's not close enough to be too terribly helpful, and in fact it's diverged enough to be misleading.
I also am sticking to my guns about the final -us morpheme that singular nouns, people's names, and so on, had at the end (i.e. as a suffix). It was pronounced much like the way French speakers say the u in "tu", once again. The sibilant was optional, barely sounded, unless needed to bracket the next word. Though most high school teachers tell you to pronounce it "oos", it's actually more like "ews", but barely heard.But I keep asking how you know this? I've never encountered this hypothesis in fifty years. Please tell me your source.

Our only clues to the phonetics of a dead language are:The phonetics of its descendants, which we can correlate and trace back to a hypothetical source Observations by contemporaries who spoke other languages, which give us a comparison with another language we may know more about Borrowings by other languages, which freeze the ancient pronunciation and then take it down their own path of phonetic shifts Borrowings from other languages, so we can see how they spelled them, giving a clue as to how they pronounce their own lettersConcerning Latin, all of these clues argue strongly against your hypothesis and none of them support it at all. That's why I keep asking where you got this stuff from. You don't bill yourself as a Latin scholar so I guess it's not original research. Where then? How do you know how ancient Romans pronounced their words, since they didn't have gramophones?

Please tell me your source.Not sure I can, but that's how the -us is always pronounced, it isn't pronounced "oos", at all. The final syllable was never stressed, and Latin speakers would have pronounced a more relaxed sound, like "ws".

The French pronunciation of the "u", that you refer to as an umlaut, I recall being instructed was the best reference for the sound. Obviously they can't have been identical, and obviously, there isn't much chance of ever knowing how Classical speakers sounded.

It doesn't have anything to do with anything. It's just an inflection telling us the noun is in the nominative case.The nominative inflection of Greek nouns doesn't have anything to do with "anything"? That's a bit contradictory; either a sound has a meaning (a resonance in some language), or speakers make things up, because none of it has "anything to do with", well, anything...?

How's this theory: the Greek "rho", and the Latin "m" sound, (-m signifies "we/us"), came together to get "Roma, Romae". Which means: "at my and our place".

P.S. the final sibilant on most Latin words, including 2nd person verbs, was always in apostrophe to the following vowel in the next word, or skipped if (it was a) consonant. Saying the dictionary entry for "res, rei" should come out something like "ray, zrayee"; but the "z" is barely sounded, it's a sibilant z, type of thing.

I said: One aspect of this innate or genetic controlled potential does touch on some of the things Vkothii is posting. "
... I think that we already know the extent of the influence of human speech physiology and psychology on phonetics: All languages draw their vowels and consonants from the same set. ...The production of sounds is only a tiny part (pehaps none?) of the linguistic revolution Chomsky made. I just mentioned it as Vkothii was going into details about the mechanism of speach production and had not mentioned the developmental changes in the action and location of the Glottis.

You mentioned vowels. One aspect of them which is geneticaqlly cvontrolled is the boundaries between them. As you no doubt know, what we hear is not a copy of what was produced. This is easily demonstrated by cutting out (in tape recording) small parts of speach and replacing by equally intense buzz etc. which is not heard, etc.;however what is facinating to me is the great variation of the sounds maed by a speacfh syntizers with will be heard as /a/ (slashes indiacted the sound of contined symbol)

I forget the details but there are only about 6 "knobs" to adjust on a so0phisticated speach generator making the vowels. Some of the vaowel differ only in the setting of one or two of these knobs. (I think from memory that /a/ & /e/ are sucha pair.) I will just speak of the setting of one of these basic "knob characteristics" To illustrate, making it up:

A standad /a/ might have that know ste to 12 and standard /e/ to 27. but if the knob is set for 5 or 18 you hear /a/ just as well as if it were set to 12. like wise, both 20 and 34 are heard as /e/. The transition between hearing /a/ or /e/ is very sharp. Perhaps only very near 19 will some people hear /a/ and others hear /e/. THIS IS INNATELY SET for all humans (and guinnie pigs too at the same location).

But again that is not the main point of the chompsky revolution. That is much harder to explain. Has to to do with the relationship of various POSSIBLE stuctures in sentences and between senetences. For example the way you make a question for a statement. (Jack hit paul. Who did Jack hit.) In English often found with the "w words" who, what, where, why ...

And within sentences how a dependent clause transforms etc.

The really strange thig is that if you do one of these transformation by way "A" the you MUST to a nother few in a particular way. yet there are dozens of ways of doing these sentence transform structures. You can not just "mix and match" - your native language has one set with them all perscribed innately. Some one else with a different native language will have them all perscribed also, but by set "B". Part of set "A" with part of set "B" does not exist in ANY LANGUAGE.

Probably wiki tells what I am trying to better. Do try to read Chomsky - I have 3 of his books and did not get any help form them - Steven Pinker is much more clear on what is the "Post Chompsky" revolution of linguistics.

what we hear is not a copy of what was produced. Every one of us applies their own personal inflection-map, when we speak, when we listen, or when we read stuff.
Even in music, we hear non-existent notes and rhythms, because we expect to, or our brains do.

I have mentioned that infants can only gurgle, they have to learn how to make the velar sounds, like "k", and the gutturals, which is like overcoming the swallowing, or coughing reflex.

Another thing about learning how to make noises, and invent our inflection "dictionary": the last, probably, that we learn how to do is whistle.
Whistling effectively requires a geometry that means close muscular control of the tongue, which is rolled up into a tube and held close to the front of the palatal, or dental surface. It also requires close control of the circular ring of (orbicularis) muscles around the lips. Infants can't do it; it takes a few years to evolve.