SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CXCV, Number 3; February 2026, C HIEF C AT H ERDER &, A RBITER OF THE L AST W ORD, Trey Jones, O RDER OF THE, S PECULATIVE P SAMMETICOI, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, Tim Pulju, Bill Spruiell, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXCV, No 3, H EAD OF L EARNING, L INGUISTICS T HROUGH, S ATIRE AND P UNS, Jonathan Downie, S YNTACTICO- P OET &, U NDER- E DITOR OF, U NDER- E DITING, Deak Kirkham, S ENIOR P UZZLING, T EST P ILOT, Vincent Fish, K EEPER OF THE, E DITORIAL T EA C ADDY, Pete Bleackley, A SSOCIATE D EPUTY, A SSISTANT S UB- M ANAGER, OF S ATIRICAL S UCCESS, Luca Dinu, O RTHOGRAPHER- A T- L ARGE, Daniel Swanson, D ILETTANTE E MERITUS, Tel ... [ more ]

SpecGram Archives. A word from our Senior Archivist, Holger Delbrück: While bringing aging media to the web and hence the world is truly a labor of love, SpecGram tries the passion of even the most ardent admirer. Needless to say, we’ve fallen behind schedule. At every turn, the authors found in the pages of this hallowed journal stretch credibility with their gratuitous font mongering—first it was the IPA, then a few non-standard transcription systems, then Greek, and not just the alphabet, but the entire diacritical mess, and now I’ve got some god-forsaken Old Church Slavonic glyph sitting on my desk that no one can even name, and which would give the Unicode Consortium ... [ more ]

— http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress Welcome to the online home of Panini Press, an academic publishing house formerly dedicated to the proposition that Linguistics is the noblest of the academic fields, but now with a focus on Subjects of more relevance to the Working Linguist’s everyday life and career. ❦पा Important announcements from Panini Press: ❧ Word Problems for Linguists (November 2025): Linguists, we here at Panini Press know you thought that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill. However, the real world often has other plans, so, for your own good, Dr. Barbara Millicent Roberts’s new book, Word ... [ more ]

Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co. 1957. This slim volume, first published in 1957 and occasionally reprinted since then, has attracted surprisingly little attention in linguistic circles. It is unfortunate that this is the case, for in the book Chomsky proposes a truly innovative approach to syntactic problems which have plagued linguists since the days of Bloomfield. Essentially, Chomsky proposes that actual utterances should be understood as surface structures which have been derived from more basic deep structures by means of transformations. For instance, the sentence “Sir Egbert was devoured by the dragon” (my example, not ... [ more ]

Amateur Hour at the Minas Morgul All-Ages Dance Club. From Elven Clones and Epigones to Quidditch Drones and Drudge of Thrones . by Artemus Zebulon Pratt, Editor-on-the-Lam. Recently of an evening, having finally gotten a break from the profound joys of proofreading symbolic logic in T E X format (but then, once you’ve mastered cuneiform, anything is easy), I shook my head as I finished editing a collective academic crawl that would have to find its feet before it could even be classified as pedestrian, comprising a whole congeries of jeremiatribes on the evil taint on English prose that is Tolkien. “Unclean! Unclean!” it shouted from every line, and one could tell the ... [ more ]

Graphophonetics, The Science of Transcription and Personality, Þrúðr Óðinsmeyjar, Lulu Über Linguistic University Graphology, the ridiculous pseudoscience debunked and redebunked many times over the decades, holds that one can determine a person’s primary personality traits based largely on their penmanship. That is of course utter hogwash. Even if the basic tenets of graphology were correct (and they just might be!), one’s personality is likely not to be fully formed by the time one learns to write. Major life experiences, significant physical and biochemical maturation, and important destiny-making choices are still far in the future. Also, one does not necessarily have much to ... [ more ]

Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics. by Trey Jones. As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been. Let the adventure begin ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIV, Number 3 Propreantepenultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Vincent Fish; Associate Editors: Luca Dinu, Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Emily Davis, Andrew Lamont, Gabriel Lanyi; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; The Syntactic Structures of Linguistics; February 2025, ... [ more ]

The SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda. Welcome to the SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda. The SpecGram Archive Elves™ have undertaken a project to digitize and share a sheaf of early 20th century SpecGram propaganda posters, which were used during the Great Linguistic War and the Second Linguistic War to encourage linguists everywhere to keep a stiff upper lip and a sense of humor during those trying times. We provide the digitized posters here for you to enjoy, retrospect on, and share. Select a poster to see a higher quality image, and for links to share on social media, to email friends, and to view or download the highest quality version of the image. ... Read SpecGram Every Month! ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT, Titles in Fantasy Linguistics, from Scholartastic Books, ––– Now Available! –––. Here are even more titles from Scholartastic Books’ FantLing division that you might enjoy reading: Jonathan Livingston Suprasegmental, by Richard Back-Vowel The Singulara Series, by Terry Books The Word of Singulara The Elf Tones of Singulara The Whispering of Singulara Articulatemis Fowl, by Eoin Configurational The Tone is Rising (series), by Susan Copular Underspecified, Overtone The Tone Is Rising Gerundwitch The Grave King Silver on the Syntactic Tree The Little Principle and Parameter, ... [ more ]

The Origin of the Modern Pronunciation of “Tea”. H.D. Onesimus. The etymology of the word ‘tea’ has been the subject of fierce debate since the dawn of British philology. Tea already had an approximation of its modern phonetic value when it came to Europe in the 16^th Century, via Portuguese import, but it is well known that the character 茶 was pronounced [t^hu] in classical Chinese. The circumstances of the change in vowel quality have never been fully explained—a problem this article will remedy. During China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), the indispensability of cavalry units in contemporary warfare gradually became clear to the emperors. Unfortunately, ... [ more ]

Metrical Dimorphism: An Onomastic Noun-Verb Hypothesis. by G.R.R. L’Power & Lexi Kahn, Ph.D. Candidates, Department of Onomastic Empowerment, Hervard University. There is a well-known pattern of disyllabic word pairs in English that differ primarily by stress. The table below presents a few examples:^* cóntest / contést, décrease / decréase, éxtract / extráct, ímport / impórt, ínsult / insúlt, óbject / objéct, pérmit / permít, présent / presént, récord / recórd, súspect / suspéct, In this paradigm, nouns carry initial stress, while verbs shift stress to ... [ more ]

Further Studies in Multilingual Stimuli Incongruence. An Experimental Study Preregistration. Badkamer Schildpad Syrup. J. Ridley Stroop, my sixteenth cousin four times removed, is famous for his 1935 experiment demonstrating that naming the color of a word is more difficult when the word is itself the name of a different color. For example: RED GREEN BLUE. Less well known is that our extended family—particularly the Syrup branch—is particularly competitive. As a result, ever since I began studying experimental psychology, my parents and grandparents have waged a never-ending campaign encouraging me to “keep up with the Stroops” and “out-Stroop ... [ more ]

Velum, Velum, Little Thing; by Phrançoise Phonétique; From Volume CLXVI, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; January 2013 — Velum, velum little thing. / How I wonder where you swing. / Up above the tongue so high, / Like a larynx in the sky. (Read by Les Strabismus.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

Speculative Grammarian and SpecGram.com. Our Story. The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields. SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while ... [ more ]

A Love/Hate Relationship: Pesky Antonyms. Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University. When students get to college, the majority of them have never thought about antonyms as being anything more than “opposites.” So big is the opposite of small, just like buyer is the opposite of seller. Then, all of a sudden, students are forced into a linguistics course with a professor who tells them that they have to learn to differentiate among different types of antonyms. Student’s minds are nearly exploding with information as they have to learn definitions of terms like ‘converse’ and ‘gradable’ and ‘complementary’ in the world of ... [ more ]

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