The Divine Future of Linguistics, Part I

by John Miaou
with the assistance of the editors of SpecGram

Linguists need money. A lot of money. Unfortunately, sponsors do not always give linguists money. This sorry state of affairs needs to change, and it is in our own hands to rectify it. SpecGram has already offered some suggestions on how to achieve this by selling naming rights and advertising space. Here we will suggest another way out of our discipline’s financial misery.

Taking our lead from various bogus religions and cults created to milk money out of their memberships, we intend to reform linguistics as a religious movement. We will organise regular fund-raising events during conferences, gather collections during seminars, and sell specimens of specially-crafted religious iconography, such as photos of somber-looking professors, jewellery in the form of syntactic trees, clay replicas of tape recorders, old airline tickets from linguistic fieldwork, autographed blackboard erasers, and small bits from Chomsky’s own pens. Furthermore, we can expect rivers of donations from ignorant faculty-fearing students. As a religion, any money we make will naturally be tax-exempt!

In order to achieve status as a religious movement, we need to re-design our activities to be more like a church’s. We also need a more clearly-defined liturgy. Our dear professors can become our priests, linguistics departments can serve as our places of worship, academic seminars can become our sermons, and the annual LSA meetings can henceforth function as our very own Synods. Luckily the discipline of linguistics is already sufficiently fractioned and filled with ideological infighting, so that particular aspect of religion we need not emulate. New theories and dogmas are constantly spawned from old ones.

We need to recognise a set of sacred scrolls, too. Fortunately, these already exist. There are in fact numerous linguistics textbooks that are treated as immutable dogmas in various departments. Furthermore, famous textbook authors should from now on be referred to as Prophets. In addition to our ordinary textbooks, we need a set of secret, unpublished scriptures that are considered essential reading for those students who wish to pass their degrees. Naturally we will charge a humongous fee to access these secret, unpublished texts, which can consist of anything from seminar handouts, scribbled field notes from personal notebooks, and random extracts from rejected book manuscripts.

We also need a celestial collection of deities, semi-gods and idols; even demons, goblins and gargoyles. More specifically, we need our own God, preferably several. Indeed, a whole pantheon of Gods of Grammar has already been outlined in the pages of SpecGram in Ǣlfgār λ. Garcia’s article on Divine Unification Grammar.

In order to keep the linguists happy and loyal, they need to be encouraged to participate in this New Global Linguistic Congregation. Besides the purely formal hierarchy (from students to professors), we intend here to establish a parallell, more spiritual hierarchy aimed at recognising those tireless members of our Global Linguistic Congregation who have done more good than harm to linguistics. For this, some of us will be acknowledged by being elevated to Sainthoods and Guardianships.

Saints are protectors of specific linguistic segments and units, while Guardians are protectors of classes of elements. Indeed, any vowel, any consonant, any phoneme cluster, any secondary articulation, any suprasegmental phenomenon, and any graphic symbol, as well as every little diacritic no matter how funny it looks, will be be assigned a Patron Saint or Guardian. For instance, we have elevated Franz Bopp to be Patron Saint of [bʰ]. Similarly, Joseph Greenberg is now the Guardian of All Implosives, Jacob Grimm is the Patron Saint of [i], while Otto Jespersen is the Patron Saint of the Wee [i].

The number of Patron Saints and Guardians that can be recognised is virtually limitless. There exists, for instance, an infinite number of points in the IPA Chart between, say, [i] and [e], even without considering the many varying phonation types. By extending Sainthoods and Guardianship also to elements of morphology, syntax, pragmatics, etc., any past, present and future linguist can be assigned a Sainthood or Guardianship. Even though Sainthoods and Guardianships will ordinarily only be awarded to those linguists who have passed on to the Great Heights Beyond the 3rd Formant, a handful of still-sounding linguists have been recognised.

This is just the beginning!

So...

Let it be known by all, and let them hear who have ears, and let them see who have eyes, that the linguists hereby recognised as either Saints or Guardians will from now on, till the end of all utterances, be regarded as Divine Protectors of our Holy Field of Language. Any one of them may be summoned for inspiration in times of darkness and silence. Should a word be too hard to pronounce, or a sentence too difficult to parse, you may kneel in solemn prayer and humbly ask for moral encouragement and guidance from the following revered linguists.

[Note: This is only part one of the list. Part two will appear in an upcoming issue of Speculative Grammarian. —Eds.]

	Graphophonetics—The Science of Transcription and Personality—Þrúðr Óðinsmeyjar
	German—English Großwörterbuch/Big Word Book—Book Announcement from Psammeticus Press
	SpecGram Vol CLVIII, No 2 Contents