The following letter to the editor has unfortunately been "lost" in the SpecGram mailroom for more than ten years. It appears that our head mail sorter, the once famous Nim Chimpsky, has apparently been tossing incoming mail behind cabinets for years.

We are now in the process of sorting through the misplaced mail. It turns out that in addition to the interesting letter below, we may have already won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes several times.

--ed.

I have recently seen evidence for the subtle but powerful theory presented in Greenan and Hopp's article "Minimal Forests". In a recent class of an Introductory Linguistics course, the instructor was, coincidentally enough, using data from Sindhi to exemplify the subtle but powerful method of minimal sets. The examples given were:

pənu	'leaf'
phənu	'snake hood'
bədʒu	'run'

Notice that the form bənu 'forest' was neglected, resulting in only a near minimal set.

Alas, the deforestation has begun.

	From These Ashes...--A Letter from the Managing Editor
	A 21st Century Proposal for English Spelling Reform--H. Sanderson Chambers III
	SpecGram Vol CXLIX, No 1 Contents