Innumerable Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 3 Contents On the Cryptographic Uses of TLAs—Dash Ŋ. Ooba-Nuhd

Startling Allegations Rock Historical Linguistics Community

by Andrew Lamont

BLOOMINGTON, IndianaIt has been an exciting week for the Indo-Europeanist community. While Monday saw the announcement of Bob’s Law, which derives the modern English Pez dispenser from the Proto-Indo-European *pesd-, today’s news marks a more controversial chapter.


Scholars point to sloppy forgeries like this tablet as proof of Grimm’s misconduct.

Recently uncovered documents suggest Jacob Grimm may have forged evidence to support some of his theories.

“We now suspect that the entire Tocharian branch may have been invented by Grimm to further his career and possibly to impress women,” Professor Schmaltz, a noted figurehead in such matters, explained. “After all, we’ve had tremendous difficulty deriving the word yakup in Tocharian A that is claimed to correspond to PIE *deiwos.

At a press conference held earlier this morning Schmaltz also cited accounts of Grimm’s character by some of his contemporaries:

Karl Verner wrote of Grimm, “Jacob was there at the onset establishing sound change rules. He worked tirelessly, never stopping and never shifting his opinion.” More damning is a letter written by Hermann Grassmann after Grimm’s death stating, “When I first met him, he had two aspirations: academic rigor and a drive to become famous. As he got older it seems the first gave way to the second.”

This new theory, unveiled at the ongoing Construction of Reconstructed Languages conference, may be supported by work of folklorist Professor Jones of the Totally Legit School of Language Studies.

Jones notes that a hidden confession may be found in the classic fairy tale The Two Beans, or Zwei Bohnen, die verbrüdert sind, diskutieren die moralischen Implikationen des Fälschens historischer Dokumente, um die Karriere einer der Bohnen zu fördern, one of many collected by Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm.

The text may have gone unnoticed by researchers this long for two main reasons. First, the bean that likely represents Jacob Grimm, has consistently been mistranslated into English as Jacob Melancholy the Bean, instead of Jacob Grimm the Bean. Second, as Jones points out, the relative dearth of violence in The Two Beans has diminished its popularity.

“Of course, as with any Grimms’ Fairy Tale, there is a fair amount of unnecessary violence, but in The Two Beans, the focus is Jacob the Bean’s monologue in which he takes responsibility for gross academic misconduct.”

In response to these allegations, Thomas Grimm, a descendant of Jacob Grimm, announced he had recently discovered a box full of his ancestor’s documents indicating both his innocence and access to a modern-day word processor and printer.

[Editor’s Note: This ground-breaking news story first appeared on the LINGUIST List Blog in April of 2015, and is reprinted here by permission of the author. —Eds.]

Innumerable Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t KnowMadalena Cruz-Ferreira
On the Cryptographic Uses of TLAsDash Ŋ. Ooba-Nuhd
SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 3 Contents