² P.M. Pistol (personal putdown) now informs me that Car Park Grammar does indeed predict the existence of the VOV pattern, given yet another device, the Double-Headed Pink Arrow. Independent support for the DHPA is provided by the fact that certain strings are unexpectedly ill-formed in Pistol’s dialect; e.g., *Trace theory strikes me as a big step forward and *These new papers by Bresnan and Lightfoot are exciting.

³ I am a slow worker.

⁴ It must be admitted that the linguistics department at the U of SND at H is perhaps not quite so up to date as it might be on the theoretical side, and that my attempts to introduce the faculty to works written since 1952 have met a mixed response at best. Nevertheless, in a spirit of Christian charity, I can only forgive the somewhat intemperate comments on my work which have occasionally been made, as, for example, by the head of the department, Professor Snodgrass: “Fieldwork? That long-haired fancy-pants pinko pansy from MIT wants to do fieldwork? The one who thought an allophone was a French telephone? I’ll bet he can’t even find the ‘record’ button on his tape recorder. Haw haw haw.” I do, however, resent the suggestion that I only received an unprecedented eight research fellowships from the university because the department kept hoping that I would be eaten.

⁵ These recordings are now available in the Language Archives and Fertilizer Storage Space at the U of SND at H, under the heading Kluj, vols. II-IV and VI-VIII. Volume I was never recorded, due to an unfortunate difficulty with the tape recorder. Volume V was recorded, but after a Klujan cat chose to relieve himself on it, it acquired a rather pungent smell, and the librarian/gardener refused to have it in the Archives.

These tapes were the source of some of the difficulties between Professor Snodgrass and me. The economic situation being what it is, I had to re-use old tapes for my fieldwork; by an unfortunate mistake I went off to Cojones with tapes containing several thousand hours of Professor Snodgrass’s telephone tapping (Professor Snodgrass is a devoted disciple of Charles Fries). When he discovered that I had unwittingly erased the results of five years’ work, he became somewhat more excited than usual and attempted to nail me up behind the door next to his Chomsky dartboard. Fortunately, I was able to persuade him that there remained enough tapes to do valuable work. It transpired that these remaining tapes contained only some 600 hours of the Speaking Clock in Fargo-Moorhead which had been recorded by mistake. From this superficially rather barren corpus, Professor Snodgrass, by applying rigorous post-Bloomfieldian distributional analysis, was able to produce his magnum opus, “The Grammar of Time in North Dakota”. This was offered to our local organ, the Working Papers of the Linguistic Circle of North Dakota and South-Eastern Saskatchewan; but it was unfortunately rejected (the first contribution EVER rejected by the WP of the LC of ND and SES). Fortunately for all concerned (especially me), he was able to find another publisher, and the work will be appearing shortly in Linguistics.

⁶ It must be confessed that these difficulties are at least partly due to the fact that, for excellent medical reasons, I never attended a single one of the phonetics practicals I was supposed to do for my degree. It is also true that I was never able to solve any of the morphology problems in Nida’s book, but I believe that linguistics should concern itself with higher things than morphology.

⁷ On making this discovery, I immediately informed Professor Sticky of Ohio State University, who I knew was even then composing a masterwork to prove that such things cannot be. He promptly obtained a grant to come and see for himself, and a few days later he arrived at Cojones, smiling confidently and assuring me that he would “have this little wrinkle sorted out in half a jif”. As the days passed, however, he became increasingly morose and refused to talk to me about Kluj. One night he turned up at my hut with a strange expression on his face and explained that he had found a beautifully simple solution to the whole problem and was going out to check it with some native speakers. The nature of his solution began rapidly to dawn on me a few minutes later when I heard a long burst of fire from my Uzi and, rushing outside, I found that he had machine-gunned some sixteen of my informants. Had he not fortunately run out of ammunition at this point, I shudder to think what the consequences might have been for linguistic metatheory, not to mention for me, since I suspect that Sticky’s suddenly-professed interest in amateur fire-eating does not entirely explain the can of gasoline I found next to my bed and my notes. In any case, it hardly seems fair to blame me for the resulting bad publicity, which led the Dean once again to renew his threat to merge the Linguistics Department with the Department of Advertising and Packaging, or worse still, with the Department of Phonetics.

⁸ Pretty nifty, eh? Actually, this bit has nothing to do with the rest of the paper, and I’m not even too sure I understand it. I just copied it out of a book and stuck it in to give the impression I’m au fait with all this dreadful hairy formal stuff you keep seeing nowadays—you know, Shaumjan, Karttunen, Gazdar, people like that. To tell the truth, I’ve never made it through three pages of Shaumjan or Karttunen, and as for Gazdar, all I’ve ever understood from his stuff is that he doesn’t care too much for Geoffrey Sampson. I don’t see why he can’t write in English like other people, instead of in those funny little squiggles. He sure does have a superbly sarcastic delivery, though, even though it makes me feel inferior. And while I’m at it, I may as well confess that I had to look up the spelling of au fait in the dictionary.

⁹ Such as consonants and vowels. I have used the symbols ʔ and i more or less at random to indicate any segment whose precise phonetic nature I was never able to elucidate. This should not be taken to mean that the remaining transcriptions are accurate. Those damn Klujans never seem to pronounce a word the same way twice.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, a summary of Klujan phonology will appear in the forthcoming Festschrift Snodgrass. Professor Snodgrass, feeling somewhat aggrieved that no one had seen fit to prepare a Festschrift in his honor, intimidated his students into organizing one. The response so far has been somewhat disappointing, however, as the only contributions have been three dog-eared typescripts which have apparently been rejected by every journal in the Northern Hemisphere, an obscene verse, a typically original paper from Hasenpfeffer deriving certain Black English lexical items from Lappish reindeer-driver’s slang, and a rather fulsome tribute which was obviously written by Snodgrass himself under a pseudonym. For this and other reasons, the work is affectionately known around here as the Snodgrass Shortschrift.

¹⁰ Even more common, in fact, are utterances in which the final attempt at the verb is followed by a curse or, more commonly, a string of curses. Actually, such patterns as VOVC, VOVVCCC, VOVCCCC, etc., are so frequent in ordinary speech (the Klujans apparently finding curses easier to think of than verbs) that for a while I considered taking VOVCC as the basic word order. I finally decided against this on the ground that it was undignified. It was in connection with this problem that I seemed to have found a language that was worthy of my talents.

G. Gazdar, eschewing for once the use of the second-order predicate calculus, has suggested (personal junk mail) that the superficial VOV pattern of Kluj sentences is to be derived from underlying VO by means of two rules: (1) a rule of inverse reduplication (or “broken mirror” rule, as he calls it), which repeats all the words of the sentence in reverse order, thereby converting VO into VOOV, and (2) a rule which deletes the second of two adjacent identical NP’s. Such a proposal is typical of the armchair linguist who only reshuffles other people’s data after someone else has done the spade work. To the experienced investigator (i.e., me), it is immediately and blindingly obvious that such derivational complexities are far beyond the average Kluj speaker’s “competence” (I use the word in its technical, if ridiculous, sense), and Gazdar’s proposal will not be further considered, not even to be crushed by a dozen devastating counter-arguments.

N.B.: I am compelled by the US Freedom of Information Act to admit that in fact I have no such counter-arguments, but am merely bluffing.

¹¹ P.M. Pistol, in the vanguard as always, assures me that he has already added several new colors to his collection of pencils, and that we can expect revolutionary new developments from him any day.

¹² It is customary, in works of this sort, for the investigator to express, in the most nauseatingly fulsome terms, his undying gratitude to his informants for having put aside their livelihood to answer thousands of idiotic questions about subject-to-subject raising, for having graciously provided most of the crucial insights leading to whatever cockeyed analysis he is proposing, for having darned his socks, ironed his shirts, and tenderly nursed him through a bout of yellow fever in preference to their own children, for having through their rich and sensitive mythology and poetry, revealed to him the Oneness of all living creatures, and for having generally contrived to make him a wiser and better human being. I trust that my fellow linguists will forgive me if I depart from this tradition for once, since I cannot honestly say that I found my Klujan informants even bearable, let alone friendly and cooperative. Their repeated attempts to poison my water supply, while no doubt amusing enough at first, eventually wore my patience rather thin. I cannot say, either, that I found the land mine buried in front of my door the least bit entertaining, and I am sure that Mr. Frobisher, our late postman, who discovered it, would agree with me if he were still with us. In fact, it is difficult to say which of my informants constituted the gravest menace to civilized society, though I would be inclined to nominate the Klujan’s Managing Director, Harvey Wallbanger, whose habit of sharpening his butcher knife and running his finger across his throat with an evil grin whenever he saw me did nothing to improve my concentration. It is perhaps best for all concerned that he was one of the victims of Professor Sticky’s solution. Nor can I say I am sorry to have smelled the last of Swampgas Annie Veeblefetzer, whose unique combination of unpleasant personal characteristics made her single-handedly the principal source of air pollution in the entire valley. From this general condemnation I might almost except old Sanford Chickenwing-Smythe, the group’s bugi, or public-relations man. True, he was not much use as an informant, since he was never sober enough to say anything coherent, but at least he never attacked me, threatened me, or threw up over the microphone, like most of his fellow Klujans. But the only Klujan for whom I retain any degree of affection at all is Suzette “Hot Pants” Cummings-Shortley, whose generous and even enthusiastic attempts to teach me her language, and several other interesting things, by one of the most time-honored and delightful techniques, were undoubtedly the high point of my investigations. It was only after a number of these sessions, followed by a hasty visit to a physician, that I began to understand why the other Klujans, who still harbor a violent grudge against the rest of us for draining their ancestral swamps and forcing them to invent thousands of new verbs, used to refer to Suzette as their “secret weapon”. And while I’m on the subject, I would like to offer my most sincere apologies to all those young ladies in my Field Methods tutorial group who may have found themselves unwitting and indirect victims of the Klujan’s revenge.