Regarding tones, I recently read that they came about with the loss of final consonants. When a word ended in a voiced consonant, the consonant was dropped and the word took on a lower tone. Similarly, voiceless consonants became higher tones. Now Mandarin only has (I think) the /n/ and /ng/ final consonants (I guess maybe also the retroflexed /r/). The Wikipedia article on tone covers tone history pretty well.

I also read a paper by Olle Kjellin which discussed tones in Tibetan, which, he argues, is at a different (earlier) stage of this transition. Tibetan has both final consonants and tone, and the tone is entirely predictable only using phonological rules given the words (with their consonants, which are not always pronounced). Interesting read.

Common and proper nouns* take 's as the possessive affix, but pronouns do not. It just so happens that the plural form of the pronoun it is the same as if it were a common noun. Similarly, the possessive of "who" is homophonous with the contraction of "who is". Compare:

• I, me, my, mine
• you, you, your, yours
• he, him, his, his
• she, her, hers, hers
• it, it, its, its
• who, who(m), whose, whose

I don't see any apostrophes in that list. So I believe it is logical for the correct spelling of the possessive of "it" to be "its".

* interesting note: it's not just nouns, but noun phrases. Thus we can say "The CEO of Reynholm Industries' office" and mean the office belonging to the CEO, not to "Industries" or to "Reynholm Industries"

"kankoku de ha, sobieto roshia no jyooku ga rojin dake no mono da"

I'm not a native speaker, but that doesn't sound quite so cool. But if you're interested in Soviet Russia jokes in Japanese, this is invaluable. It even has some C code to make Hello World into a Soviet Russia joke.

And that is why I say it "is also a whole lot less" (emphasis added)

Sorry I wasn't being confrontational or anything. I just like pointing out when two opposite statements can truthfully be used for the same thing. Linux < Ubuntu, and at the same time, Ubuntu > Linux.

Cheers!

...Linux is, in a manner of speaking, a whole lot more than Ubuntu

To be certain, Linux is also a whole lot less than Ubuntu, given that it's just the kernel.

Ah, i was unclear. I was talking about Japanese words brought into English. In Japanese itself, of course, there's no pluralization like "ninjas". And you're right, most common nouns are numberless. Although you can add "tachi" or "ra" to common nouns sometimes, to force them into being plural, but that's a little uncommon. Also, sometimes reduplication (like "hito" -> "hitobito" or "sore" -> "sorezore") makes things pluralish, but one could argue that they are actually different words with different semantics.

Funny thing is, the plural of many Japanese words is the same as the singular. Eg the plural of "samurai" is "samurai", the plural of "futon" is "futon", and the plural of "sushi" is "sushi". Sometimes people go against this ("ninjas" being a prime example) but this has been the general trend.

For the pedant in all of us, the GP is correct. Etymonline explains how the -pi inflection results from an overgeneralization of the latin -us to -i pluralization (eg. status -> stati, terminus -> termini), but octopus is Greek (oktopous), not Latin, and the plural of pous (foot) is podes.

Unforutunately (of fortunately, depending on your stance), many of these words are losing their original inflectional category and are being "regularized" to the more Englishy -es (octopuses, statuses, terminuses). Many dictionaries (or the one you provided) don't even list "octopodes" as a plural (and they even list "octopi" since it's taken on a kind of folk-correctness). In order of historical correctness, it would be "octopodes" > "octopuses" > "octopi". In order of usage (and general acceptance by the masses) it would be "octopuses" > "octopi" > "octopodes"

Now, if we all spoke Chinese or Japanese, there would almost be no such thing as "plural inflection" (imagine all nouns being like mass nouns... "one octopus", "two octopus").

Except that the judges were from the "medicine, chemistry and physics committees" (note, link is TFA), not the peace committee.

I also have an x61t, and I, too, happily run Linux (albeit Ubuntu), but I would actually recommend sticking with XP considering your needs. (My tablet came with Vista, and while I wouldn't recommend that to anybody, I think it has the same handwriting recognition software as XP)

Previously-mentioned CellWriter is a grid-entry recognition system, meaning you have to write each letter in a box. Windows has great handwriting recognition that works on whole words. Using the Journal program, I could write notes down, then open up a search box and type in a query and it would find and highlight the handwritten text matching that query. Xournal, while great software, has nothing of the sort (granted, this is not Xournal's fault, but because of the lack of real handwriting rec.)

Also, even with Powertop I never found the battery life to be very good in Ubuntu (this may just be compatibility problems with Thinkpad models). Rather, do as someone else suggested and try a SSD drive. Also, turn off your wireless card when not using it (and while you're at it, other unnecessary services).

In the end though, a tablet is indeed very usable with GNU/Linux, but Windows will give you better handwriting recognition and perhaps more power savings.