The entropic time cycle and meditational means: Some musings Just a few days after Ron Scollon had passed on, Sigrid visited Hawaii. Walking through the rainforest, gazing at some very old trees, her mind wandered to Ron, who had studied in Hawaii many years earlier. There in Hawaii, he had learned to be a linguistic anthropologist, with Li Fang-Kuei as his mentor. Afterwards, he had gone to Fort Chipewyan Alberta and to Alaska, where he had made a substantial difference in the way Native Americans were treated, before he moved to Hong Kong, then to Georgetown, then back to Alaska. Looking at a particularly old tree, Sigrid's thoughts drifted to the many weekend walks Ron and Suzie had taken together with his students and the students' friends and families when he was a Professor at Georgetown University. They had made a point to take groups of students to the Blue Ridge Mountains or to Maryland to hike. One of Ron's favourite hikes was Old Rag, the biggest mountain in the area. There in the wilderness, he had conversations with his students about theory, methodology and life in general, while everyone was enjoying the fresh air and building strong bonds. Watching a waterfall, Sigrid thought about rhythms and cycles of time. Ron had developed the idea that there are at least six time cycles that each action needed to be considered in. The largest cycle, usually the entropic cycle, had resulted in the decay of Ron's body, but now Sigrid could see that there was another cycle that Ron had not mentioned, namely the cycle of thought. Thought, when expressed in meditational means that have a longer lifespan than an individual's body, lives on. No news there. Aristotle, Socrates or Goethe come to mind. But then there is another thought cycle, and this one appears to be located in the minds of social actors who knew and understood a social actor's thoughts before he passed on. All of Ron's students are now part of this thought cycle. This type of remembrance is built on relationship and decays as the bodies of the

Dorthe Duncker explain a new strategy for managing orthographic variation in a corpus of historical texts. Two papers address other methodological concerns. Comparing results from distinct grammatical acceptability judgment tasks, Isabelle Buchstaller & Karen Corrigan identify inconsistencies. Steffen Höder questions the traditional standard variety focus of areal linguistics, arguing for greater consideration of dialect convergence processes. Theoretical issues are probed too, including change from above/below in Niina Kunnas's analysis of the role of morphological diffusion in relation to vowel changes in Viena Karelian, an endangered North West Russian variety. The push-pull influences of internal versus external change are the focus of Sofie Henricson's comparison of quotatives in Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish. Marianne Rathje questions the notion of "reported" and "repeated" speech in relation to quotatives, which she redefines in terms of Bakhtin's concept of "double-voicing." Her cross-generational study shows variation in the form and frequency of quotatives in Danish. Three papers deal with lexicographic issues. Wojciech Gardela examines changes in the orthographic form of present participles in fourteenth to fifteenth century Northern English and Scots texts. Saija Tamminen-Parre's qualitative data shows that Finnish speakers' attitudes towards English loan words are connected to topic domains. Tjaša Jakop explores the diversity of terms for "cousin" across Slovene dialects. Finally, Brit Maehlum's closing historical overview of research on urban varieties in Norwegian highlights the relevance of attitudes to linguistic varieties in variationist research.