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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 ]
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 ]
Top Tips For Linguists— Part II. The SpecGram Editorial Board. Realizing that many linguists, young and old, find themselves unsure of how best to succeed (or have success thrust upon them), we of the Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board have assembled a collection of high-impact protips that will help any linguist achieve their full potential—and then some! Continued from Part I... You can represent some of the patterns simply all of the time, or all of the patterns simply some of the time, but you can’t represent all of the patterns simply all of the time. Control definitions, and you control the means of model-production. The smart way to keep linguists ... [ more ] 
Linguimericks & The Lingumerickocalypse, Book १०५. Though tempted I am to critique The French orthographic physique, When comparing with English I find naught to distinguish, So I’m saying they both have “mystique” —Roman C. S. Pelling, There truly is just a small touch Of irony, not very much, That the Teutonic sounds In Germany’s towns Aren’t called by the apt name of “Dutch” —Joost van Deutscher, Common Sense[i]s My Japanese Linguistics teacher told me, ‘Antonyms are pairs of lexemes with opposing senses; Lexeme A has sense A and lexeme B has sense not-A. Common sense, eh?’ As this definition opposed my senses, I asked, ‘Teacher, ... [ more ]
αdvαnced Move-αnαgrαms —The Yì Līng. by Trey Jones. As noted previously, the joy of Chomsky’s innovative “move-α” was that it freed the language/speaker/linguist/syntactician to move anything, anywhere, at any time, for any reason, as long as doing so didn’t violate any important principles or parameters (with the important ones being those that don’t obviously need to be violated to make one’s theoretical point). In a somewhat more constrained variety of that spirit, we present another Move-αnαgrαms puzzle for your amusement. If you aren’t already familiar with ... [ more ]
The Sociolinguistic Impact of Hippie Linguist Naming Practices. ɹɒbɪn O’Jonesson. There is little discussion in the literature concerning the social and psychological effects of the distinctive and unusual names given to children by their hippie parents, such as Moonbeam, Peacekarma, Ryvre, Starchild, Redpony, and so many more. Even less attention has been paid to the naming practices of the particular sub-culture of hippie linguists, who advocated for free morphemes in the 60’s and gave their children names such as Monophthongbreathstream, Pronouncopula, Rezonator, Asteriskchild, Redponymy, and Noam. ... The family VW van in 1971. Very few people so-named have kept their monikers into ... [ more ] 
ADVERTISEMENT Stymie Stylometry!. Do you have a vitally important, world-shattering, culture-shifting, society-upending rant, screed, or manifesto that you are unwilling to publish because The Man will certainly come after you? You are right to be concerned, because your language can and will betray you! Stylometry—a nefarious statistical linguistic technique—can be used to identify the unconscious fingerprint of your language, providing authoritarian authorities with a lodestar to follow right to your doorstep! Radicals such as Ted Kaczynski, Joe Klein, and Bill Shakespeare have all had their authorship revealed by pesky statistical philologers with too much free time on their ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXXVIII, Number 3 Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Senior Editor; Jonathan Downie, Senior Editor, Pete Bleackley, Contributing Editor, Deak Kirkham, Contributing Editor; Associate Editors: Vincent Fish, Mark Mandel; Assistant Editors: Emily Davis, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Luca Dinu, Joe McAvoy, Mary Shapiro, Reed Steiner; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; It’s All Fun and Games Until a, Variationist Shows Up; October 2020 ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXVI, Number 2 ... Trey Jones, Managing Editor, Keith Slater, Senior Editor, Bill Spruiell, Consulting Editor, Tim Pulju, Editor Emeritus; Associate Editors: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, David J. Peterson, Mikael Thompson; Editorial Associates: Pete Bleackley, Cem Bozsahin, Kathleen Brady, Florian Breit, Jonathan Downie, Adam Graham, Daniela Müller, Mary Pearce, Chris Niswander, Callum Robson, Mary Shapiro, Adam Tallman, Rachael Tatman, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Language, Thought, and Real Estate; January 2013 ... [ more ]
SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Computer Language Appreciation Issue Volume CLI, Number 2; April 2006, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLI, No 2, Bold New Tagline, (Same Great Content), MANAGING EDITOR, Trey Jones, EDITOR EMERITUS, Tim Pulju, SENIOR EDITOR, Keith Slater, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Bryan Allen, Adam Baker, Candace Cardinal, Teal Doggett, Daniel Currie Hall, Martin Hilpert, Damon Lord, Steven Lulich, Kean Kaufmann, Sheila McCann, Ken Miner, Michael Niv, Jamin Pelkey, Mikael Thompson, Nathan, Sanders, Bill Spruiell, Adam, Ussishkin, Rita Watson, Joey Whitford, ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXII, Number 2 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Bill Spruiell, Senior Editor, Sheri Wells-Jensen, Consulting Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Florian Breit, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Samuel Andersson, Robert Beard, Bethany Carlson, Tel Monks, Laura Ryals, Adham Smart, Isabelle Tellier; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Rebel Without a Clause; February 2015 ... [ more ]
On the Necessity of a Tri-Branching Corpse. by Tirizdi. (Translated from the Original Zhyler1 by Quentin Popinjay Snodgrass, Ph.D.). In his landmark text Zixÿ Erwilevö (usually translated as On Humanish Language), the great Zhylerian philosopher Tirizdi explains everything from language acquisition to hypothetical phonetics. As the tome itself is rather ponderous (the expanded second edition contains more than two thousand pages of text), Tirizdi published several articles which summarize his points on, for example, phonology, semantics, and the pragmatics of combat. The present article is a condensation of chapter seventeen, regarding the way in which words are put ... [ more ]
Language Evolution and the Acacia Tree. by Sean Geraint. Last year, renowned treethnographer Garik Roblerks noticed that two books on the evolution of language had strikingly similar covers. Both Christiansen & Kirby’s Language Evolution and Fitch’s The Evolution of Language boasted an acacia tree in the sunset. On closer inspection, these turned out to be different pictures of the same tree. ... A comparison of the books, by Christiansen & Kirby (left) and Fitch (right) Having spent a year tracking trees in Kenya, I can confirm that the tree is from Maasai Mara National Reserve. The tree has attracted a lot of attention since its entrance into the glamorous world of book cover design, and I ... [ more ]
SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLVII, Number 4; December 2009, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLVII, No 4, 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, 99% more inquiring than Linguistic Inquiry, ... [ more ]
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Last updated Mar. 5, 2026.