<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2853" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear colleague linguists in the field of typology,
it was quite strange to read that you criticized </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>Prof. Dr. Elisabeth
Leiss<BR>Lehrstuhl für Germanistische Linguistik<BR>Department für Germanistik,
Komparatistik und Nordistik, Deutsch als<BR>Fremdsprache<BR>LMU
München<BR>Schellingstraße 3/RG<BR>80799 München</FONT><BR>She is a professor
and she has a secretary. This is why, nobody can criticize her. When I was in
Germany in 1990 I learnt that a German professor speaks to a person only through
a secretary. One should state his topic and tell the secretary. After that a
German professor usually say through his secretary that she has no time to
discuss this topic. This is why, <FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>Prof. Dr.
Elisabeth Leiss thinks that she can prohibit linguists to discuss certain
topics. What do you think? Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk,
Russia</FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>