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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 ]
“Interpretez seront les extipices”, On the Correct Interpretation of Nostradamus, Part the First. by Roger Prentiss Claremont, Independent Sovereign Scholar. Nostradamus, or Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), often also called “Nostrum-Addled,” is world-famous as a prophet and soothsayer. His prophecies are cast in the form of 1200 poems (only 949 of which are extant), mostly quatrains, grouped in twelve “Centuries,” which have provided steady employment for any number of people in the years since their publication in 1555. However, even the most scholarly study of his works available, the article in Reader’s Digest’s Strange Stories, Amazing Facts ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIV, Number 2 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, Nina Sloan; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; We Put the [ˌsuʷpɚˈsɪliʲəs] in [ˌsuʷpɚˈsɪliʲəst]; October 2024, ... [ more ]
Making Metalanguage Great Again. by Dr Mattie Langwich. A clear validation of the pedagogical efficacy of linguistically- and metalinguistically-rich classroom instruction has recently laid to rest any residual doubts as to the usefulness of this once contentious mode of instruction. The research focussed on the voiced ~ voiceless alternation in fricatives in English inflectional and derivational word-building processes. As a salient part of the English grammatical system, this underpins lexemes with high frequency across a variety of genres. The alternation is seen (only with labiodentals) in certain irregular plurals (knife ~ knives, wife ~ wives) as well as (with interdentals, labiodentals and alveolars) ... [ more ]
A Brief Puzzlicious Interlude. with John Miaou and Laura Payne. This month we have two mini–rebus-like puzzles for your mini–rebus-like amusement. To start, John Miaou has provided a second Language Identification Puzzle, given at right. Also, the following folks completed the first Language Identification Puzzle, (the answer is Hixkaryana, which, importantly, is OVS) and will be getting SpecGram magnets for their efforts: Adam Bernard, Anita Hammond, Elke Karan, Ken Mallot, and Philip Newton. Congratulations to all! To continue, the following people completed the Out-of-this-World Fieldwork Puzzle #1, and will also receive a SpecGram ... [ more ]
How to Reply to Meaningless Conversational Openers: Authenticity Without Impoliteness— A Linguistic Approach. Ian P. Lightness, N. Auden, T. Szitty. Astute and regular readers of SpecGram1 will remember a recent report on the banning of the ostensibly harmless conversation opener How are you? in three whole counties of the UK. The report ricocheted around the internet over four times, causing consternation, conversation, and chatter across five continents large swathes of the economy several mountainous regions two sub-sub-editors. While in the end the rest of the world did not follow the lead of Wildonshire, Detshire, and Shireshire, it was widely ... [ more ]
New Children’s Programming from SpecGram TV. Are you worried that the current crop of kids’ TV is leading your progeny towards building, engineering, and driving trains? Are you concerned that there are not enough shows about the wonderful world of data collection? In our latest season, SpecGram TV has just what you have been looking for. Here are some of our newest titles. The Acoustic Company—In this show, a variety of fun sketch comedy acts are used to teach young listeners how to read spectrographs in a fun, low-pressure environment. Bill Eye the Dialect Guy—Bill I. bowtie-wearing dialectologist, explores the sociolinguistics of prestige and ... [ more ]
Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, I found your reply to FS/Effie concerning the Doom/Punod manuscript to be patronizing, condescending, stilted, disfluent, and oddly formatted. That can mean only one thing: steganography! The first letter of each line spells out the words “the black copters”. When I re-formatted your reply in a fixed-width font, the rest of the message appeared in the 12th column: “are coming for you”: ... I hope Effie escaped unharmed. Sincerely, Ron H. Neely, (no relation) — Dear da-doo-Ron-Ron, As is well known by any well-informed practitioner of the delicate art of ... [ more ]
Spaz Attack in the Corner—Don & III. Linguistics: “Look! Look! I’m flying...” ... [ more ] 
Bʀoᴋɛɴ Nɛws Nɛᴛwoʀᴋ. New Study: In Some Languages, The Future Is Now. According to a recent study published in The Journal of Linguistic Chronistics, a language known as Silghen may provide groundbreaking insights on the relation between human cognition and temporal perception. The language, spoken in a remote corner of Western Europe, may show that the ability to think about the future is not a universal human trait. In the study, the authors write that “The verbal system of Silghen shows not only that living in the moment is an important aspect of Silghen culture, but also that speakers of the language cannot conceive of the idea that a time period other ... [ more ]
A Speculative Scavenger Hunt. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Much fascinating information has been published in the pages of Speculative Grammarian over the centuries, but it can, on occasion, be a challenge to find. This is the challenge that the SpecGram Puzzle Elves™ put before you now. Identify, if you can, the articles in which the following things can be found. You will need wit, guile, lateral thinking, linguistic knowledge, and an insight into the strange minds of the various shady characters who produce this journal. The Roman alphabet as featural code. A Spaniard sensitive to cold. My self-referential wallet. A cat with many markings and none. An essential for the glossopoetic ... [ more ]
“Conlang” Added to Oxford English Dictionary. SpecGram Wire Services. Rejoicing has swept through the conlanging community at the news that the word “conlang” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. A spokesman for the Language Creation Society greeted the news by saying, “We’re all delighted. This word was itself created by conlangers to describe their art. We conlangers invent words all the time—it’s what we like doing—but to get one into a real dictionary, well, that’s the ultimate accolade.” Not everybody welcomed the announcement, however. Jonny Scotland, of the Wikimedia Foundation, told SpecGram, ... [ more ]
The Elizabethan Canuck: Linguistic Proof of, Shakespeare’s Canadian Ancestry , By Mabel Leaf and Elizabeth Furst, Published 2012. While debates over the authorial unity of Shakespeare’s œuvre have long since been consigned to the periphery of linguistic debate, work continues on the more useful topic of the sociolinguistic markers present in his plays. By close analysis of his use of the lexical item “ay,” this volume shows that the language used to compose Shakespearean poetry and drama is not, in fact, Elizabethan UK English but is instead Canadian English. Comparison between “ay” and similar sociolinguistic features in modern spoken corpora such as the “like” in ... [ more ]
The Real Etymology of Timothy. Eura U. Pertú Peninsular Institute of Etymology. [Note: More than twenty years ago (SpecGram CXLVII.3, to be exact) we published what now appears to have been a spurious etymology of Timothy, seemingly forced upon us by shadowy forces and/or powerful lobbies. We can’t for the life of us imagine who would do such a thing. Fortunately, this original, unbowdlerized version—presented here without fear of lost fingers—quite surprisingly turned up among our executive editors’ stockpile of Hanebisho toilet paper. The truth wants to be told —Eds.] It has long been observed that Timothy is a name of obscure ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another irregular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. Grammaticalization of and Generalizations to What’s- PRO -Face Among Annoying Pre-Teens0. Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 71 Prologue. We1 have been taught by our parents to respect our elders, but we have been shocked at the lack of attention paid by grown-up linguists to the interesting and evolving phenomena occurring in our midst. Of course, grown-ups think linguistics is their ally. But they merely adopted linguistic sophistication; we were born in it, molded by it. We ... [ more ]
To Whom It May Concern. A Letter from the Managing Editor. We received a lot of mail in response to the SpecGram senior editor’s column in the last issue. To avoid further legal entanglements, we would like to offer the following clarifications: Although we regularly reject substandard submissions, even those authored by some of the sogenannte “guiding lights” of the field, SpecGram proudly subscribes to basic provision 226 of the Code of the American Association of Linguistics Journals, which states “we solemnly promise never to reject an article submitted by Noam Chomsky.” We hereby affirm that we have never knowingly rejected any Chomskian prose. (Or poetry, either.) We ... [ more ]
The Middle Finger, Having Flipped, Moves On .... A Letter from the Managing Editor. ... and so should you, dear shareholders: nor all your whining nor lawsuits shall lure it back to cancel half a bird. As most of our readers surely remember from the last issue, we had a very public and slightly testy exchange with some of our more obnoxious shareholders in this space. Apparently our initial sortie against our arrogant aggressors was more than a bit preliminary. I can’t go into too many details because a ridiculously confidential but legally binding settlement has been reached among several concerned parties. However, the ultimate upshot is that “we, the Editorial Board of Speculative Grammarian, are ... [ 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 ]
The Speculative Grammarian AutoGrammatikon™ Quasi-Universal Translator℠. On several occasions, mention has been made of the AutoGrammatikon™ Quasi-Universal Translator℠ in the pages of SpecGram; in the current epoch, these references date back as early as at least 2004.1 In the following years there have been denials,2 mentions,3 more4 mentions,5 leaked internal documents,6 and even some early oral history7 (accompanied as it was by additional denials). Throughout this time the consistent official stance of the Editorial board of SpecGram has been to deny that the AutoGrammatikon™ exists, ... [ more ]
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Last updated Apr. 20, 2026.