Dear Earls,

Fuþorc’s sake, now that the UK has finally left the EU, can we at long last please take back full control of English orthography and reinstate the traditional runic system for written communication within these islands? For well over 1,000 years, freeborn Englishwomen and men have had to bear the shame and ignominy of the continental Latinate ‘alphabet’ (a term which has never been appropriately anglicised to the ‘aybee’ (or better still, the effyu, no doubt due to excessive red tape). Quite apart from the absence of one-to-one, phoneme-to-grapheme match, the Latinate effyu has far too many curvy bits for the straight-laced English, our linear thinking and our ‘angle-ular’ island.

While I appreciate that this will require a sustained educational effort and the reprinting of millions of texts across the Kingdom, it is a small price to pay for the freedom to use a non-curvy script of Anglic origin and will allow the UK to once again become a world leader in chiselling techniques.

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Dear Thin Kyle,

You’re a complete runatic.

Effyu!

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Dear Editors,

We were most perturbed to read that you have taken the step of publishing material that purports to discuss material existing beyond the sentence. We really thought better of you.

What the tinfoil hat brigade forget with their babbling about QONTExST and theological syntax is that the sentence has long been the sine qua non of linguistic endeavour. Indeed, most of linguistics is based on it.

More to the point, those of us who learned to count and thus graduated from the building blocks and wooden trains of syntax and semantics to the sports cars of computational methods have built entire theories and careers on the foundational and vital nature of the sentence.

If there is more to language than decontextualised sentences, then BLEU scores are petty, SMT is pitiful and asking raters to score sentences for accuracy is pointless. Are we really to believe that all our hard work is nothing but narcissistic, self-justifying nonsense, simply because sentences are not the end of meaning? Are you seriously suggesting that we cave to the UNICODE nutjobs and admit the existence of ¶?

No! It shall not be. We shall not have our work sullied by alien-greeting, period-penetrating, paragraph-and-context-surfing crazies!

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Dear PIMS,

We’ll drink to that!

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Oi you!

You’d better be careful taking the mickey out of people’s businesses with articles about Greeks and stuff. Me and my mate Dwayne are bouncers at Xi Bar in Crete where which is a well dope venue with great DJs. The owner’s a bit of a twerp but I bet he’s never analysed a sentence using abstract configurational machinery like what you said he did.

So, watch it, boffins or we’ll find you out.

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Dear Craig,

Sigh-bar.

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Dear Editors,

Your correspondent Scrappy Doolittle has not just got his literature in an upside-down pickle but his philosophy as well. King Lear’s famous aphorism ‘Two be-s; I’m not two be-s’ is universally understood two be the philosophical truth that 2 be-s minus 0 be-s = 1 be. What Titus Andronicus is manifestly saying is that in responding to the paradox of being, one must embrace both the OTT (2 be-s) and the WTF (0 be-s) which in turn allows one to experience a unified, complete and total existence (1 be). The same principle underlies the denouement of the Merry Wives of Windsor in which it is precisely Romeo’s death alongside Juliet’s choice to continue living an independent, self-directed mid-adolescent life that unites the two houses of Glamis and Cawdor.

As for irregularity, I have nothing to say other than to remind your readers that had Henry IV (Part B) not outsourced the digi-planning for the attack on Harfleur to the Montgomery Python Institute, he would in all likelihood have enjoyed victory, not defeat, at Agincourt.

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Dear Shooter,

You’ve missed.

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Speculative Grammarian accepts well-written letters commenting on specific articles that appear in this journal or discussing the field of linguistics in general. We also accept poorly-written letters that ramble pointlessly. We reserve the right to ridicule the poorly-written ones and publish the well-written ones... or vice versa, at our discretion.

	E Plūribus Ēditōribus, Ūnum SpecGramma—Gunther G. Undergruntus and Gus U. Gussettgossett
	University News
	SpecGram Vol CXC, No 2 Contents