The CBB

I watched both clips and they seem like good advice to me, though I'd say that because he's aiming at novel writers, and some of us just write for self-enrichment, it's not necessarily horrible if one of us here defies his recommendations. e.g. he suggests *not* spending thousands of hours compiling...

well you didnt post the inventory itself, so Im not sure .... im curious how you got 4 labiodentals if none of them is a stop .... im guessing one nasal and one approximant? that by itself puts you on the edge, because although a labiodental nasal is attested, its quite rare and seems to pattern alm...

Trask claims there is no connection, and that "old B" had a word urragin "silversmith", though I dont think that what he calls old B is the same as what we call old Basque, so it might not be that old. https://www.bulgari-istoria-2010.com/Rechnici/baski-rechnik.pdf edit: i think old B means medieval...

Yeah, that occurred to me after i wrote the post, and i think now that it's *men* who are the most obsessed with penis size, not women. I still think women would overall lean in the same direction, but it's really the Dreamer men who cant get past the issue, and they build their worldview around it,...

I derive some pleasure from violating one of the "dont do this" items in the list a few pages back ... though to my credit, I didnt do it on purpose. The central divide on planet Teppala is between tribes whose men are taller than their women and those whose women are taller than their men. The gene...

Looking over it again, the Cambridge site really only is helpful for inanimates. It doesnt tell us, for example, how to order the adjectives if you wanted to say something like "a short happy boy". Which led me to realize it doesnt always work for inanimates either, because we personify things, and ...

The conlang has both /ɸ/ and /θ/ and I thought it'd make sense if they became voiced intervocalically, i.e., be realized respectively as [β] and [ð]. Yes, those allophones work perfectly well. Its probably true that lenition is more common than voicing but what you want has been attested or come pr...

Yeah, Ive never understood that myself. Head-final is clearly the dominant pattern, as with most of IE, but those philo- words defy the trend. The same pattern exists with miso-, "hater of", though its possible a lot of the coinages with that prefix are modern. Its possible that the Greek -o- is jus...

Poswa: Yes, I know I already did this, but I have an update. I dont think the instrumental case should really be used to solve the ambiguity, as I did in my previous post..... it's a bit like inventing the word "cashifying" to solve the ambiguity in the sentences Sal posted. I think that Poswa as it...

In Newest Unnamed Conworld, the closest thing would be prayer. Yep, it's a world with legit, real gods and goddesses running around and they can seriously wreck stuff if they start feuding (though the most powerful ones tend to ignore human warfare in favor of warfare with their fellow deities). Th...

What happens when you hit the end of the alphabet? No more new words ever, or just a slower pace?

"Bad apple" is not an opinionative adjective..... it means the apple is spoiled, something everyone will agree on. Other than that I agree with your post .... in fact I was looking for this thread earlier. Those rules may explain why brave new world sounded so wrong to me when I was a kid, but now I...

There's metal in our bodies .... calcium, iron, etc .... though if youre willing to radically rework the evolution of life, you could perhaps have us getting our body's firm parts from something like chitin, which is non-metallic, or silica, which is what plants' thorns often come from.

Excel has worked well for me for more than ten years, and it's what I was referring to above. I tried using Microsoft Access once, so I could link cognates, but I found the inability to use color highlighting too difficult.

are you sure about the pigments? i dont see why a blue pigment would be better at absorbing blue light than other colors, nor why a green one would absorb the sun's light better than other colors. after all, a black pigment absorbs all the light, right? if color was all that matters, black should be...

plenty of precedent for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_trees though, including non-Western mythology. I would just follow the same advice as above .... if youre not that familiar with Tolkien's work, chances are your ideas are unique enough that they wont be duplications of any prior ideas of...

I decided to start a new unified dictionary for my minor conlangs where the word entries are columns and the languages are rows. This is the only way I can see that will let me look at the same word in ~30 different languages without having to constantly scroll right and left. In every other way, I ...

oh, I didnt link to Wiktionary. sorry. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%9E%97%E1%9E%96 says its from Pali /bhava/, which comes from Sanskrit https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A ... F#Sanskrit . But bhumi would be still a cognate.

English :eng: be Khmer :khm: ភព /pʰup/ "planet, world" I am particularly fond of the Khmer word here not because of what it sounds like in English, but because it's a pretty good match for Poswa's pwupp- "planet, moon". But yes, /pʰup/ is a funny word all on its own. There is a Cambodian restaurant ...

Poswa: I dont really write them down in order so I cant be absolutely sure of this but my best guess for most recent word in Poswa is tšamba , "presiding over a nation". The etymology is complicated, ... it derives from Play kiasta mivi a , "president" + "nation" + "have". The /-ta/ was mistaken for...