The CBB

Ah, *now* I get it! I'd always wondered where piscina "swimming pool " comes from!

Basque is usually described as having a closed class of verbs.i don't know the details, though.

Is it at all reasonable to have words contract in place names, when they otherwise wouldn't? Mostly to avoid place names becoming too lengthy. E.g. taisat - new phalas - river Taiphlas - (name of a place - 'New River') So there would be a closed set of abbreviated forms used only for compounding. I...

Phonology Typing in IPA is a pain on my phone and I barely have a computer, so I'll do it once and use a Latin transcription after. Vowels: ɑ, e̞, i, ɪ, o, u (a, e, i, o, u) Consonants: b, ɟ (d), f, g, ɦ (h), j (y), l, m, n, p, r, s, ʃ (x), t, v, w, z Let me know if you think I've missed anything i...

NB: I intend for my scratchpads to be a public record of how I create my conlangs, and for constructive criticism from other conlangers, so I don't accidentally do something unnautralistic and have that "Canonized". I apologize if most of the community don't see it that way [:$] Right, we...

Does the root become unstressed, with the stress occurring instead on the next-to-last syllable of the sentence-word? Inuktitut says yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_phonology#Stress Finnish, though not polysynthetic, has many long words, and manages with a fixed root stress (always initi...

map of climates of planet Teppala. It's actually temperatures for January and July, in Fahrenheit, overlaced with each other .... but from it Im going to make a Köppen-like map using the lines on the map for temperature guides and my best judgment for the rainfall, which wont really need to have co...

Spanish -ía is from a verb that had once been before the main verb.... is that what converbs are? Some Italian dialects have a stronger form ...-ebbera, with various endings for different persons. Both are sufficed to the infinitive. But I don't know how the same could happen with a preposition.... ...

Did you also check wiktionary? I don't see it there either, but I'd think a list of words would be more likely on wiktionary Than Wikipedia. If not, there's also wikisource and wikibopks,but those tend to be for things that have been previously published elsewhere.

I can believe in syllabic fricatives, and have used syllabic /s/ in a major conlang, but I don't believe in syllabic stops. I imagine the stops of Nuxalk must be either aspirated or ejective, with no simple unreleased form. Therefore it would be acoustically impossible to hear the difference between...

:con: Poswa sabas "man" paefam "woman" ma "to see" pažampapwu "telescope" Sabas paefios pažampapwa va. man woman-GEN telescope-3pres see-3pres. The man sees the woman (who is) using the telescope. It bothers me a little bit that I dont have case echoing for th...

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/86051 The internet agrees with you ..... everybody hates it. The ' just doesn't blend in with the rest of the letters. Apparently ''s shape requires it to have full spacing underneath. If enough people complain they might decide to make the use of the "'" opt...

The first thing I've noticed is how nonconcatenative the morphology becomes. Take the VL word "sapere," where in one conjugation has pretonic stress and the other has initial stress (I know it doesn't — roll with me.) Example: ˈsaperɛ -> ˈsaper --> ˈsaber saˈperɛ -> sɐˈperɛ -> ˈspeɾɛ Anot...

Reduced the dictionary of Khulls from ~3000 to ~360 words. I want only words with solid etymologies from now on ,even though it means scrapping a lot of earlier work.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has said that he can tell his critics apart by how they pronounce his first name .... If it's /sEnk/ then they likely haven't watched a single clip. Joe Manchin's interview of him had Joe repeatedly using /dZEnks/ and seeming not to question it.

Mine isnt particularly interesting since its basically a reduction rather than an addition. All peoples on Teppala follow the same basic calendar, which has 5 months of summer, 5 months of winter, and 1 month of intercalary days at each equinox. If I decide to stick with a year length exactly the sa...

:con: Pabappa: puppip "yolk", from Bābākiam buta kius "hiding in the egg" (related languages have an atomic root for yolk, which disappeared in Pabappa due to sound changes) winsi "umbilical cord", from Bābākiam kivip ma ši "birth rope". :con: Poswa: babup &qu...

Pabappa

sadip "hedgehog", from Bābākiam sa mibi pi "(one who) has swords on their back in a forest"
pumpani "pumpkin", from Bābākiam tua napa ne, "vine pumpkin apple"

In southern Spain vowels are centralized before a coda / s/.... I could see this developing into diphthongs. Finnish has nakra>naura, which i suspect is part of a long and polyconditional series of changes winnowing down various inherited clusters, such that every cluster would behave differently an...

Minarchy is real ... it has a funny name, yes, but it's real ... It's basically a system of minimal government, probably agreeing in most respects with libertarianism. Wikipedia considers it to just be a subset of libertarianism, but my understanding is that minarchy is a futuristic goal, rather lik...