PIE Is the Only Proto-Language—Rasmus Grimm & Jacob Rask SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 1 Contents Minutes from the Department Meeting

Overheard* in the Linguistics Student SpecGram Editor’s Lounge

Chesterton “The Jesterton” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV
Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers**
Third-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics
Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton

All names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent.

Etymologically: Are chiasmopodes from non-linguistic articles okay?
Transitively: We generally don’t use non-linguistic chiasmopodes... though chiasmopodes is an awesome word!
Anonymuncule: Will someone please define chiasmopodes? I can’t find a definition anywhere. “crossed feet”??
Transitively: Your actual knowledge of actual Latin has actually led you astray, I think! SpecGram has Chiasmus of the Month (though it is not very monthly), and chiasmopodes is a humorous plural of chiasmus, playing on the debate about the proper plural of octopus (octopodes being an etymologically approved favorite). So, it’s just an attempt to regularize the sg./pl. alternation of -us/-opodes, which I support!
Anonymuncule: (Headbang)
Tussenvoegsel: Transitively, like Shakespeare, has small Latin and less Greek, it appears.
MilkCaramel: Heh.
Anonymuncule: If octo | pus → octo | podes then that implies chias | mus → chias | modes.

The -pus is the Ancient Greek -πους ‘foot’, if I remember correctly—also in platypus, literally ‘flatfoot’—and -podes/-πόδες is ‘feet’.

Transitively: While neither my Latin nor my Greek are particularly good, or necessarily even existent, I do know how to wield jargon like a cudgel!

So, while your alternation is -pus/-podes, me and Etymologically are going to invoke a multi-dimensional space of morpho-lexical embeddings with reanalytic and folk etymologic orthonormal eigenvectors, declare a change of basis and victory with respect to -us/-opodes, and get out!

Don’t come after me, or I may be forced to break out a dollop of “freedom of analysis” or a heaping helping of “deep learning”—which are both so murky that they may drown us all—but I’ll do it!

Etymologically: I don’t know what all of that means but it sounds scientific, so I will indeed come along!
Keysmith: Transitively, going back to you saying that the Chiasmus of the Month is not very monthly—that is just the sort of hidebound thinking that got your predecessor Τερψίμβροτος deposed. The Chiasmoi are thoroughly monthly in character, as each is clearly and unambiguously celebrated during a particular month. There is absolutely nothing “not very” about their monthliness.

Shape up or the editorial hordes may appoint another Genghis to lead us, brandishing our quill pens, in revolt.

MilkCaramel: Yet there is no Month of the Chiasmus. I find that disappointing.

More to come...


* My Grandpapá—Chesterton Wilburfors Gilchrist, Jr., of “Reanalysis of Spanish by Naïve Linguists” fame—impressed upon me from an early age the potentially career-making value of eavesdropping serendipitous fieldwork. As I am not—yet!—the eavesdropper serendipitous fieldworker my Grandpapá is, and I don’t—yet!—have his ear for finding meaningfully meaningful meaning in overheard conversations, I will keep publishing the data of my informants until I, too, make an important contribution to linguistics!

** This Research is gratefully sponsored by the ULŋW Local #1729.

PIE Is the Only Proto-Language—Rasmus Grimm & Jacob Rask
Minutes from the Department Meeting
SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 1 Contents