On the Expectedly Variable Lexicon of 955
Extremely Rapid Environmental Change (EREC)

by Etaoin Shrdlu and Elaoin Sdrétu
L.N. O’Type University
Qwertyuiop, Ontario

In June 2009, M. Oblonglotta reported (“The Highly Variable Lexicon of 955—Extremely Rapid Diachronic Change (ERDC)”, SpecGram CLVI.4) on a three-year study of a patch of rock photographed by the Mars Phoenix Lander. Oblongotta’s analysis of over a hundred thousand lines of discourse in this language—based on discrete bursts of pure wavelengths of light—led that author to the conclusion that shifts of 10-20 nm in wavelength for a given lexical item are evidence of “Extremely Rapid Diachronic Change”.

We find Oblongotta’s analysis to reflect an immature understanding of linguistics, physics, and academia in general. First off—Medulla, old pal—it was a rookie mistake to share any of your data. Providing a pointer to the source only encourages others to offer a competing analysis as the result of their own three-year study, which we shall do now.

A much more perspicacious analysis attributes these shifts to environmental change, rather than diachronic change. Consider, as a thought experiment, speakers of Mandarin in an environment with extremely variable amounts of helium and hexafluoride, resulting in variable density air. It is reasonable to assume that one would need to occasionally re-establish a baseline for tones, which are determined by relative, not absolute pitch.

Though it is takes place via a different communicative modality, the situation with the 955 data is directly analogous. Speakers are renegotiating the fundamental frequency of the exchange in response to a some change in the medium of transmission.

Our analysis supports two main hypotheses for why this should be the case:

• The Environmental Hypothesis supposes that the speakers are trying to communicate in a rapidly and unpredictably changing environment, presumably beyond the knowledge or control of the speakers, similar to our earlier hypothetical variable-air-density–Mandarin case.

• The Daredevil Hypothesis supposes that the speakers themselves are moving rapidly while communicating, causing red- or blueshift in their communicative medium.

Artist’s conception of a daredevil 955ian communicating at near light speed

While these hypotheses may seem to be wild-yet-idle speculation of the sort usually associated with evolutionary psychology—much like Oblongotta’s original ERDC thesis—they are in fact science, good and true, in that they provide testable predictions. In particular, even larger corpora need to be scanned for the relative frequency of certain predicted verbal indicators of environmental change, such as excess discussion of the weather, or for the predicted indicators of daredevil behavior, such as phrases like “Look, Ma, no hands!” or “Hold my beer and watch this!”

	Generational Differences in Set-Definitional Pronoun Reference Among the Winodanugaian—Liza Zverkov
	Normalized Independent Basis-Vector–Based Languages and the Dream of Just Universal Enough Languages—A Reply to Nsiwander-Sic—Jonathan van der Meer and I. Juana Pelota-Grande
	SpecGram Vol CLXVI, No 3 Contents