The editors at Panini Press, concerned about the negative publicity surrounding their recent press release, have urged us to print this supportive letter. The editors also urged us to indicate that suggesting this letter be published should not be construed as an endorsement of nor a promise to publish the results of the academic investigations expressed or implied in the letter itself. —Eds. Chers éditeurs des Presses Pāṇini, Nous sommes une petite UMR spécialisée dans les questions des influences de la presse écrite gratuite distribuée dans les transports en commun sur le fonctionnement de l’aire de Wernicke lors des expositions simples et des expositions répétées (trajets avec correspondance) chez la population alphabétisée de différentes tranches d’âge et de préférences variables en matière de jardinage (fleurs, potager, etc.), approche où nous marions notamment praxéomatique et pragmatologie. Il s’agit ici de questions qui ont été indûment négligées en dépit de leur importance théorique vitale pour le bien-être de l’humanité (ou au moins de la part qui dispose d’un réseau de transports publics, qui sait lire et au sein de laquelle sont distribués des journaux gratuits). Malgré notre contribution inestimable et indéniable au développement de la société, il nous a été très difficile de trouver des espaces de publication. En effet, aucune revue scientifique n’a accepté de publier nos résultats de recherche, l’ANR a rejeté nos propositions de projets cinq fois de suite et même nos propres Presses Universitaires ne décrochent plus le téléphone quand nous essayons de les joindre. Nous préparons aujourd’hui une présentation globale de nos travaux sous forme d’un livre pour lequel nous sommes toujours à la recherche d’un éditeur (Klincksieck non plus ne voulait pas de nous). Nous sommes donc heureux d’apprendre l’ouverture de votre maison d’édition scientifique et nous nous efforcerons de vous faire parvenir notre manuscrit dans les meilleurs délais (pour l’instant, nous sommes en grève de recherche – nous refusons même de lire les journaux gratuits dans le métro – mais nous reprendrons sûrement le travail après les vacances d’été). En espérant une longue et fructueuse collaboration future (sans quoi, menace est de nous faire tous enseigner « Découverte de la linguistique » aux étudiants de première année d’Art du Spectacle), nous vous prions, chers éditeurs de la maison Pāṇini, d’accepter notre sympathie collégiale. Jean-Marie Jeannot, directeur Marie-Jeanne Jeanneaud, directrice adjointe UMR 52063 PRAXITELE Université du Littoral du Pas-de-Chance ********** We also contacted several eminent linguists to see what they thought of all the kerfuffle over Psammeticus Press and Panini Press. Only one outspoken linguist dared to reply. —Eds. I am not opposed to it.† Noam Chomsky † It wasn’t entirely clear whether Prof. Chomsky was referring to Panini Press or Psammeticus Press, but we are fairly certain he was referring to one of the two. —Eds. ********** Dear Personæ Editorealis, The writer of the critique of the Contrastive Grammars Series Series relies on really old knowledge theory. It’s since been established that Mandelbrot’s Laws of Information were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of ignorance, which only the exponential growth of knowledge since April 2008 has made apparent: namely, that ignorance increasingly contrasts not with that which is known, but with that which is known but not known to be known. More specifically, an exponentially increasing proportion of humanity’s ignorance consists solely of Wikipedia articles that have been written but never read. Ignorance in the classical (pre-April 2008) sense is no longer uniquely operative in human cognition. Further along this line, Smedley and Msedley (GMT +10:43:22, 23 January 2009) have conclusively shown that classical ignorance will be increasingly displaced by this new form, which they term wikignorance; the best current estimates of the ultimate completion of this replacement suggest that wikignorance will be the only type of ignorance left to humans, on or about 18 December 2065. In humble wikignorance, Seith Klater —— SK, Your name seems oddly familiar, yet incorrect. We can’t place it. However, there is surely a wiki article about you that explains it all that we just haven’t had time to read. —Eds. ********** 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. Dear SpecGram, I recently read this in Lingua Pranca: Theolinguists have long recognized the existence of the blaspheme (e.g. Aquinas 1270, Luther 1526, Calvin 1559). And it would be hard to improve on the classic formulation of Moses 1300 (b.c.e): “A blaspheme is the minimal unit of eternal damnation.” Are there really such things as theolinguists? A.J.P. Crown —— Dear A.J.P., The minimal qualification for being sentenced to eternal damnation is being a non-thing. I would expect those doing the sentencing to be held to the same standards. Presumably a lump of clay need not apply. It has, however, been observed that in theolinguistics we don’t progress from the least complex units of speech to the more complex—i.e., the traditional linguistic ladder comprised of rungs we call phonemes, morphemes and so forth. Since the well-formedness of a theolinguist’s pontifications is never at issue, we only need to test them for authenticity. Anti-theolinguistics crusader Wittgenstein famously observed that the easiest such test would indeed be just looking on the ground for the remains of ladders thrown down to earth from on high. Later on, Wittgenstein came to revise his position as he realized that his original advice to shut up rather than talk about subjects nobody has any business babbling on about would lead to an incredibly shrinking universe of discourse—a de-babbling (or, as the postmodernist, trace-seeking reading has it, de-bubbling) of such cosmic proportions that all that would be left over for the members of the scientific community to do would be pushing on a tiny string—no matter whether those scientists’ original calling was physics or economics. (As a means of preserving their privilege of being enthroned at the top of the Great Hierarchical Food Chain of Scientific Beings, physicists have proposed they be allowed to use special terminology—such as prefixing “super” to any dimensionally ungraspable materialization of the “string” thing.) The status of authors like Georges Perec with regard to their positioning in the theolinguistics/anti-theolinguistics debate remains as yet undetermined. Some practitioners of theo-linguistics classify the approach chosen by Perec as experimental anti-theo-linguistics because of its heavy reliance on avoiding the use of God’s most frequent tool of communication, i.e., the letter “e”. Others in the same camp have decried these pronouncements as the first step to getting involved with—and thus tainted by—the demonic concepts of secular linguistics which the idea of the “blaspheme” as “the minimal unit of eternal damnation” was meant to supersede. The most common repartee by anti-theo-linguists to the accusations leveled against them by the aforementioned subset of enraged, yet alphabet-conscious subset of theo-linguists was to assign a question to users of their textbooks á la “It’s left as an exercise to the reader to work out why this might not actually be so”. At least one student is known to have come up with the response that in a world where morphemes are scarce, meanings tend to multiply to the point where each morpheme carries at least one meaning derived from the domain of intuitions commonly lumped together under the heading of theology. —Eds. ********** Dear Editors, The number “15” in Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain’s article on the Shigudo looks like an error to me. Shouldn’t it be: klo’klo’a? Sincerely, Sincero Lee —— Dear Sincero, We’ve asked Edmund about the number 15. klo’klo’a would be more compositional, wouldn’t it? Of course his notebooks are almost 50 years old, but he said the “useful numbers” only go up to about 15, and he recalls that, back in the 1960s, klo conveyed a meaning of “an awful lot”, so klo’klo’klo also conveyed “more than any normal person should care about”. Nowadays, Spanish numbers are used most often, and the Gudo numbers are often reduced to being just grammatical affixes. That, or he just made a transcription error in his notebooks and our editors didn’t catch it. We’ll have a junior editor flogged just to be on the safe side. —Eds. **********

	Hájāmpájas—A Letter from the Managing Editor
	Pivotal Moments in the History of Linguistics—John Miaou and Kean Kaufmann
	SpecGram Vol CLVI, No 3 Contents