More Glimpses into the Collective Subconscious—Fom Pop Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca Contents Regarding the Development and Decay of Mongolian Vowel Harmony: with Special Reference to Copernicus and Galileo—Robert I. Binnick

On the Continuing Obvious Superiority of Relational
Networks in Representing Just About Anything

S.M. Lockwood and D.G. Lamb

We have been waiting more than three decades for someone to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Metalleus in his article, entitled Rule (Lingua Pranca, 1978), in which he encodes some rather complex ideas in a rather opaque formalism, more or less daring someone to re-encode the same in a better way. We would have done it ourselves, but we can’t figure out what the original means, if anything. We had high hopes for Tim Pulju after his tour de force, “A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese,” (PsQ. XVI.1, 1988), but it’s been 20 years and he hasn’t taken up the challenge either, so we’re giving up on him.

As most linguists are aware, if any challenge implicit in a published linguistics article remains unmet for more than 35 years, the author issuing the challenge earns the right to assert that there is no one capable of refuting their implicit (and also their explicit) claims, and thus those claims are proven to be fundamentally true1—probably by the subtle but powerful method of mathematical induction (Greenan & Hopp, SpecGram CXLVII.4, 1993), but we’re not really sure). Thus it falls to us to make at least a token effort to refute Metalleus’s implicit claim that his rule formalism is superior to all others.

As Pulju alluded to, in fact our rule formalism is superior to all others. Relational networks can succinctly and intuitively2 encode any and all phenomena.3 Below is a simple example that is likely more complex than whatever it was Metalleus was doing. Specifically, it encodes all possible variations on Editorial titles found on the covers or title pages of the journals and anthologies found on the SpecGram website up to the time of the publishing of the present anthology.4

Following Phlogiston (SpecGram CLII.1, 2007), we showed our intuitive diagram to a ten-year-old joint niece of ours, and after only two minutes she was quite adamant that it was completely understandable and that she comprehended every morsel of information it contained. What could constitute better proof?

1 At least it is fairly clear that this is the procedure Chomsky has been following for the past 100 years or so, so we assumed it was a rule somewhere.

2 They are psychologically and neurolinguistically plausible after all!

3 By “any and all” we mean any and all phenomena that can be understood by the person doing the encoding. We suspect that not even Metalleus knows what his Rule was encoding.

4 A natural class if ever there was one.

More Glimpses into the Collective Subconscious—Fom Pop
Regarding the Development and Decay of Mongolian Vowel Harmony: with Special Reference to Copernicus and Galileo—Robert I. Binnick
Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca Contents