Slater’s unearthing of a language whose extreme complexity of evidential categories led to language death is the greatest linguistic discovery of the century. His innovative approach to doing fieldwork is also fantastic. No graduate course in field methods, semantics, sociolinguistics, or historical linguistics can be complete unless it includes this article and its four follow-up studies.1
1 Yeah, that’s the whole review. It’s short and sweet, to be sure. So much so that M.A.Y.N.A.R.D. flagged it for further study. Our forensic accountants are looking over Onesimus’s and Slater’s bank records to make sure there’s no hanky-