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Vicensima.

Cicero, Ad Atticum 2.16.1: Portoriis Italiæ sublatis, agro Campano diviso, quod vectigal superest domesticum præter vicensimam? With the Italian tariffs lifted and the field of Campania all parceled out, what domestic revenue is left besides the vicesima? I suppose the only thing I don’t like about this one is leaving vicensima untranslated.  But I think […]

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Scyllas in Ovid.

Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.331-2: FÄ«lĭă | pÅ«rpÅ­rÄ•|ōs NÄ«|sō fÅ«|rātă că|pÄ«llōs pÅ«bÄ• prÄ•|mÄ«t răbÄ­|dōs || Ä«nguÄ­nÄ­|bÅ«squÄ• că|nÄ“s. The daughter who stole the purple hair from Nisus now pushes down rabid dogs with her crotch and groin. This one’s a bit weird on its own.  The woman being spoken of is Scylla—or rather, two women named Scylla; […]

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Atlantic word of the moment.

ganÉ›. (É¡É‘Ì€.nÉ™) adj. Deadly, poisonous, dangerous, noxious, baneful. [Âdlantki *gani. Kirumb *ganos, Proto-Indo-European *gÊ·hn- ‘to slay’.] I don’t know how late this formation was, but Pokorny doesn’t show any cognates  that would have been built from the pattern *gÊ·hn-no- as this would be.  Most of the derivatives of this root refer to the act of […]

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Acentetum.

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 37.10, on quartz crystals: Quæ vero sine vitio sint, pura esse malunt, acenteta appellantes, nec spumei coloris, sed limpidæ aquæ. Those which are in fact flawless are preferred uncut and are called acenteta; and they are not cloudy in color, but of the color of clear water. Acentetum is from the […]

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The letter śádí.

So the other day I was working on a page for the Kirumb Alphabet on FrathWiki.  There are a few things here that I’d forgotten, and it took comparing a few other files to work out the details, but one thing everything seemed to have in common is that the standard Kirumb dialect had one […]

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The Ibran vowel inventory.

Went through my list of Ibran sound changes to try and produce a canonical set of vowel phonemes in the language. Not entirely sure that this is complete or correct—a quick glance through the vocab I’ve generated so far showed one or two things I’d overlooked, both in the vocab and in the rules, but […]

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Potestas – Cicero

Cicero, Ad Atticum 6.1: Illud quidem fatebitur Scaptius, me ius dicente sibi omnem pecuniam ex edicto meo auferendi potestatem fuisse. Scaptius will admit this at least—that when I was judge he had the opportunity to carry off all the money from my edict. I don’t think ‘when I was judge’ is exactly the best translation […]

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‘Buzz’ in Âdlantki

I wanted something cognate to Latin bombÄ«re when I started working on this word, but all the other cognates seemed a little too European; I ended up going with the PIE root *bhrem- instead (so the word is related to the Âdlantki word for ‘bee’, vormi.) The root gives an unattested Kirumb normal stem *brim-, […]

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Vergo – Cicero

Cicero, Ad Atticum 16.6: Sed tamen perspice quo ista vergant mihique aut scribe aut, quod multo malim, adfer ipse. But anyway, look into which way things are leaning and either write me or, what I’d much prefer, let me know in person. Haven’t done one of these in a while.  Will try to post more […]

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Words that ROT-13 into anagrams of themselves

All right, so the list of words that ROT-13 into their reverse is already known. Makyo mentioned this afternoon that ‘arena’ is almost an anagram of itself in ROT-13 (it’s neran) and of course I was struck with the urge to find out which and how many words actually are rearrangements of themselves after ROT-13 […]

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