SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLXV, Number 4; October 2012, MANAGING EDITOR Trey Jones SENIOR EDITOR Keith Slater EDITOR EMERITUS Tim Pulju Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXV, No 4 CONSULTING EDITORS David J. Peterson Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Daniela Müller Mikael Thompson, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Cem Bozsahin Florian Breit Jonathan Downie Adam Graham Tel Monks Mary Pearce Callum Robson Mary Shapiro Sheri Wells-Jensen, COMPTROLLER GENERAL Joey Whitford Stop Voicing Now! ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Merchandise. Introduction. In order to lend a hand to our good friends and steadfast supporters over at the Linguist List during their 2006 fund drive, we prepared a small selection of limited edition SpecGram merchandise, including T-shirts, stickers and magnets. Originally these items were only available as prizes awarded as part of the Linguist List fund drive. In 2012, several of the SpecGram editors suffered from a rare form of collective frontal lobe damage, which made it seem like a good idea to put together a SpecGram book. The result in 2013 was The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics. In 2014, Editor Mikael Thompson entered a deep fugue ... [ more ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Language and Psilofotismology. Tel Monks. The concept of highlighting should define the field of a science. My justification would be as follows: we must think that highlighting gives us the assured means of broaching the possibility of the project (or its play) proper to something which I will consider at the appropriate moment.¹ The effort will be laborious and will overthrow the violence that speech (vox), writing (grapha) and logos (legos™) have brought to bear on the wrongness (viscosité) of highlighting in Western texts (the lack of italics is mine). Far from being, as might be naively imagined, the mechanism of demarginalizing selected syntagmata—I weigh my ... [ more ]

Obituary. It is with great sadness that we report that Velma Hortensia Schleppengruber passed away last week at the age of 37. Ms Schleppengruber was a legendary figure among laboratory phoneticians as perhaps the most cited subject in the history of instrumental phonetics, though her participation was not limited to that field. Among her most famous appearances in the linguistic literature are the following: “The experimental design was a standard attention-tracking experiment with stimuli on the computer screen accompanying the target sounds. A total of 47 infants were tested, but the data for one infant were excluded due to failure to habituate to the design after 45 habituation trials.” “An initial ... [ more ]

A Primer in, SF Xenolinguistics. - eep opp ork ah-ah -, Justin B. Rye. — - ash nazg durbatulûk -, Table of Contents. Fantasy Exotic Tongues—An Introduction, Let’s Speak Alien—In Ten Easy Lessons, The Unspeakable—And The Unthinkable, Universal Translators—A Buyer’s Guide, CETI for Beginners—Little Green Manuals — - borag thungg -, FANTASY EXOTIC TONGUES—An Introduction. If you’ve reached the online version of this article chasing the search-string “ +fantasy +exotic +tongues ” then I’m afraid you’ve probably come to ... [ more ]

Palinilap Cimordromic, Center Embedded Passives. Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük, Universitätsphilosoph, University of Qaanaaq, Greenland. Across the world, increased intercultural contact via business dealings has led to the spread not only of English and other linguæ francæ of business, but also of business cultures. In many industries and geopolitical zones, the two main competitors in the marketplace of ideas are Japanese-style corporate and personal responsibility (up to and including seppuku, as needed) and American-style quicksilver-like shifting of blame. Unsurprisingly, the American way is winning out, in large part because it is ... [ more ]

Ten New Commandments for Linguists. Transcribed from the original Stone Tablets by Trey Jones, With much help from the Commandment Clarification Committee, including Joel Boyd, Aya Katz, Jouni Maho, Ken Miner, Daniela Müller, David J. Peterson, and Joey Whitford. As a Linguist, thou art an ambassador for the scientific study of Language and languages in the land of the monolingual naive speaker. Even though the monolingual naive speaker roll their eyes at thee and chastise thee as a word-obsessed fool and exalt their own native speaker competence, thou shalt proselytize the study of “Language with a big-L” whenever and wherever thou mayest do so, spreading the true word of descriptivism and railing ... [ 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 ]

Personal Ads for Linguists—including linguists of every kind seeking romance, academic partnerships, and more—all with that special SpecGram twist. N.B.: Information in personal ads is provided by the submitters. The editors and publishers of Speculative Grammarian are not responsible for their content, including, but not limited to, typos, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, bad judgment, factual errors, bald-faced lies, or lapses in national security ... [ more ]

The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics . For decades, Speculative Grammarian has been the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics—and now it is available in book form—both physical and electronic! We wish we were kidding,¹ but no, seriously, we’ve published a large³ collection of SpecGram articles, along with just enough new material to force obsessive collectors and fans to buy it, regardless of the cost.⁴ From the Introduction: The past twenty-five years have witnessed many changes in linguistics, with major developments in linguistic theory, significant expansion ... [ more ]

Divine Unification Grammar. Ǣlfgār λ. Garcia, Güthlestan Seminary. One of the most hotly contested aspects of modern syntactic theory is its emphasis on modular subsystems of grammar and, in the case of some authors, its postulation of a genetic basis for these subsystems. In one particularly popular theory, Government and Binding (cf. the Chomsky stack in your local library), linguistic competence is said to be due to the interaction of a number of modular principles which bear no relation to any other cognitive system, and which are ultimately due to genetic encoding. Such an explanation, of course, has numerous problems, among which is the fact the reduction to genetics is, in effect, a ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLVII, Number 3; November 2009, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLVII, No 3, CONSULTING EDITORS, Ken Miner, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jouni Maho, Daniela Müller, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Yahya Abdal-Aziz, Jonathan Downie, Carin Marais, Mary Shapiro, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kean Kaufmann, Joey Whitford, F =, G·m₁·m₂, ... r², ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLIX, Number 4; September 2010, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLIX, No 4, CONSULTING EDITORS, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jouni Maho, Daniela Müller, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Bryan Allen, Mathew Block, Bethany Carlson, James Coomer, Tom Dougherty, Carin Marais, Laura Payne, Justin Rye, Jessie Sams, Nick Williams, COMPTROLLER GENERAL, Joey Whitford, Turning “Hard to Believe” Into “Incredible!” for 128 Years, ... [ more ]

On the Terrible De-Grammaticalization in Hujulukinat. Hans Forz, University of Schellenbutt. Hujulikinat, a previously thriving language of Amazonia, is facing imminent danger from a phenomenon that has up to now escaped the notice of linguists. Indeed, the ailment of this language had been deemed impossible by a number of linguistic authorities that the present author contacted from the field via satellite telephone. The alarming development that has fallen upon Hujulukinat is the seemingly irreversible de-grammaticalization of functional categories into derogative lexis. Local consultants explain that it all started with the dual marker /kwe-/, which was being reanalyzed as ‘number two’ and so acquired ... [ more ]

UXⁿ: The Implications of Sampson’s Proof of Universal Science. Bjorn-Bob Weaselflinger, Oceanographic Institute of Nevada—Kairo. As this author has noted elsewhere, it is not uncommon in linguistics—just as in other sciences—for an observation with stunning implications for the field to go largely unnoticed; a researcher will advance an analysis to deal with a highly localized, recalcitrant problem without realizing that the analysis itself is a revolutionary advance. Some advances do draw attention, but the attention itself remains localized, and the wider significance of the advance isn’t recognized for quite some time. This latter situation is an accurate ... [ more ]

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