SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 4 Contents Letters to the Editor

Ane, Twa, Three

A Letter from Associate Editor Jonathan Downie

After our recent “incident” with a certain group of contributors—plagiarism and an investigation handled as professionally as one might expect on current academic budgets—we were glad to take a breath and start thinking about the future of this august, nay, renowned journal. Now, flush with our recent rise in the rankings (thank you, automated citation counting algorithms!), we are proud to announce some real and lasting changes in the journal.

Sabrina Bendjaballah, Noam Faust, Mohamed Lahrouchi and Nicola Lampitelli (eds.), 2014, The Form of Structure, the Structure of Form: Essays in honor of Jean Lowenstamm, John Benjamins.

Chiasmus of the Month
August 2015

Firstly, astute1 readers will notice an immediate increase in sarcasm, irony and subtle in-jokes. These will, we are assured, increase private mirth by 40% and improve our rankings in the “we made someone chortle on public transportation” tables. Of course, this will not have any impact on our publication schedule or on the quality of the articles we offer, just as the quality of articles published in journals does not change one jot when they move from annual to monthly publication.

Secondly, due to the continued rise in the popularity of constructed languages, this entire issue has been released in the world’s most popular constructed language. The author of this language obviously prided themselves on their knowledge of a wide variety of languages as their creation—semi-Germanic in origin, with large swathes of French influence—also includes words with Celtic, Norse, Danish and Latin roots. In some fields of knowledge, even Greek can be seen as a root language. The power and beauty of this language can be found in its unusual spread, with hundreds of millions of people speaking it, or something resembling it,2 on a daily basis. Truly, the inventor of “engle-ish” is worthy of praise.3

The third change is that we have taken note of the cognitive linguistic finding that people tend to take in knowledge in groups of three and so will be announcing changes in groups of three from now on, even if there isn’t enough quality material for three announcements. We plan to fill the spaces created by this decision using the same method used by corpus linguists to explain their findings.


1 Thus, readers who fail to notice these changes are, by definition, not astute. Not our fault, really.

2 We’re onto you, ’Muricans!

3 Some argue that the inventor of this language was drunk at the time, pointing to its confusing morphological and orthographical conventions. To that, we can only respond, “Have you never actually met conlangers? That is exactly the kind of thing they would do!”

Letters to the Editor
SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 4 Contents