Much of what's on this page consists of unfinished (some barely begun) databases in StarLing format; to view them, you need to download and install the StarLing software from the Tower of Babel site. The main package is star4win.exe, but it is also recommendable to download the Harbour version of StarLing, star_hb-2.2.2.exe, as it is more frequently updated. The Harbour .exe file should then be placed into the \starsoft\bin\ folder created on your PC by the installation procedure for star4win.exe, and run from there.

Professional stuff.

The African Archive: a set of Swadesh wordlists for various languages belonging to the hypothetical Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Kordofanian macrofamilies, compiled from various published sources. Nilo-Saharan wordlists are in much better shape (predictable, since the languages are quite few in comparison to the gigantic Niger-Congo family), but I am working on expanding the lists pretty regularly. Also contains subsets of very tentative etymological databases for said families, where the information on the basic lexicon is entered from a more historical point of view.

The Khoisan Archive: ongoing research on Khoisan languages, with - currently - an emphasis on the reconstruction of "Proto-Peripheral Khoisan" family, including Northern (Zhu) languages, Southern (!Wi-Taa) languages and Eastern =Hoan. These are raw drafts, replete with lots of non-unified notes and comments and various little bugs; somewhat more polished databases are available on the Tower of Babel site (but not for download, only for browsing).

The Dravidian Archive: most of the Dravidian databases are located on the Tower of Babel site, but these are the most up-to-date versions, although, again, rawer and harder to follow than the "official" versions. I am currently busy going through all the etymologies once again and writing detailed comments in order to justify some of the reconstructions and also to cut the existing Proto-Dravidian inventory "down to size" (Burrow & Emeneau's comparative dictionary includes 5000 entries, which, obviously, is way too much to truly represent the Proto-Dravidian inventory of root morphemes). The archive also includes an incipient comparative database on Kannada dialects.

The Yeniseian Archive: contains very little apart from an incipient database on Yeniseian comparative nominal morphology and morphophonology.

The Chinese Archive: several databases and .DOC files here, such as an early-stage database on Karlgren's Grammata Serica (which I plan to eventually merge with S. Starostin's database on Chinese characters as a general repository for information on Chinese etymology), as well as slowly growing collections of Old Chinese texts in Old Chinese transliteration, some of them, like the Shijing file, with extensive comments. For research and teaching purposes.

The Sino-Tibetan Archive: currently containing an incipient database on Karen languages. The Tower of Babel's Sino-Tibetan database is mainly based on but six languages (Old Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Lushai, Jingpo, and Lepcha), and this situation has somehow to be remedied.

The Long-Range Archive: modified versions of the Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, and Austric databases that are still too raw to be uploaded on the Tower of Babel site, but contain various notes and explanations that make the etymologies more understandable.

Marginal Observations: the only regularly updated part of the "Only Solitaire" site. The way it is done, it does not require a lot of time and effort, and yet sets an interesting goal - to sketch a song-by-song history of pop music as far as it gets.

The Sierra Pages: the first few pages of a new site dedicated to the history (and memory) of Sierra On-Line.