SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Оrthоgraрhіc Perрlехer. Welcome to the Speculative Grammarian Оrthοɡrаphіс Ρerplехеr! This not-quite-pointless little tool will munge your text, randomly replacing some characters with homoglyphs that are nearly identical¹—or at least quite reasonably similar to the untrained eye. Why? To make text both very hard and very easy to find via normal search (try to find “οrthoɡrарhіс реrрleхer” on this page, for example); to confuse and amaze your friends and enemies alike;⁶ to pass the time in a ... [ more ]

Bonus Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know, (because they aren’t actually true), gathered at great personal risk of, psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers, by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira This 14th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them. Test question. Choose two of the bolded words in the following text and explain how you can assign word classes to each of them: ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All ... [ 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 ]

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, Volume CLIV, Number 3; July 2008, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLIV, No 3, 2^|S| > |S|, CONSULTING EDITORS, Ken Miner, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Adam Baker, James Crippen, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Siva Kalyan, Idan Landau, Jouni Maho, Carin Marais, Peter Racz, Major Sharpe, Freya Shipley, Erin Taylor, Mikael Thompson, Daniele Virgillito, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kean Kaufmann, Joey Whitford, VICTORES A VICTIS VISI Османска империя, Lochlannachs, Saeson, Yersinia pestis, Zhaagnaash, ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Black Leather Issue, Volume CL, Number 2; April 2005, Special Interactive 3D content, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CL, No 2, MANAGING EDITOR, Trey Jones, EDITOR EMERITUS, Tim Pulju, SENIOR EDITOR, Keith Slater, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Bryan Allen, Mark de Vries, Martin Hilpert, Edward Johnson, Steven Lulich, Sheila McCann, Jamin Pelkey, Mikael Thompson, Bill Spruiell, Rob van der Sandt, Joey Whitford, There is no spoon. ... [ more ]

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIX — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Madalena Cruz-Ferreira for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss the fact that German speakers can’t say “squirrel” and whether “modulo” is the nerdiest preposition. Finally, they give more Prescriptivist Confessions. ... [ listen ]

Pseudo-Psiblings™ And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families. A proposal for improving and clarifying family nomenclature for the 21st century. by Trey Jones. Introduction. Language evolves—otherwise we’d all be able to read Beowulf in the original, right? Sometimes language changes in response to cultural changes. But sometimes it doesn’t change fast enough to keep up with cultural changes. This paper seeks to give English a little push in a much-needed direction. There has been a fairly radical change in Western society in the last hundred years or so. It used to be that if a woman was on her fourth husband, one automatically felt a little sorry for ... [ more ]

On Revising And Extending Wh-Movement. D. Terence Nuclear, Institute for Advanced Study, in Strangeness. I assume here familiarity with Chomsky (1977), and the entire literature, published and unpublished, written and unwritten, upon which it is based. Chomsky has been criticized, unfairly in my opinion, for attempting to reduce all of grammar to wh-movement. Rather, if he is open to criticism at all, it is because he has failed to appreciate how wide the domain of wh-movement really is. In his paper, Chomsky lists the following general characteristics of wh-movement. 1. It leaves a gap. 2. Where there is a bridge, there is an apparent violation of subjacency, PIC, and SSC. 3. It observes CPNC. 4. ... [ more ]

Psammeticus Press, www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, NEW PUZZLE, This puzzle is worth 250 points. Critical Readings in Linguistics Crossword Puzzle, By H.D. Onesimus and his underlings, Presented by Psammeticus Press. Price: Free In honor of this SpecGram puzzle issue, H.D. Onesimus presents this crossword puzzle. The clues are all based on essential works in Linguistics. Prize! Anyone who submits a correct solution to this puzzle will receive a certificate for a 2.5% discount on one book from Psammeticus Press. Across, 1. Word #15 on page 234 of Linguistics for Lazy People, 4. Word #220 on page 8 of An Interpreter’s Dictionary of Linguistic ... [ more ]

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP. Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. Please review previously discussed materials as needed. Now that that is taken care of, let us consider why Natural Language Processing (or, its alter-ego, Computational Linguistics) has not been the resounding success regularly predicted by the NLP faithful: We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry/over-ripe. Time/Fruit flies like a(n) arrow/banana. pretty little girl’s school crying computational linguist Up next: Lexicostatistics vs Glottochronology. References, Baeza-Yates, Ricardo and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information ... [ more ]

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor. First, I must say to you, the interested reader or frustrated puzzle-solver, that we at Speculative Grammarian are collectively very sorry for having taken so long to publish this supplement, which includes the solutions to the puzzles in the Summer Puzzle Mega Issue of SpecGram. The delay was caused in part by the unexpected volume—running into the tens of thousands—of solution submissions that we received, and in part by the fact that Flo Zylum, our solution-checker, overindulged in Halloween sweets and slipped into a state of mobile catatonia (labelled a “hyperactive coma” by our in-house physician). By the time ... [ more ]

Language Death by Speaker Rejection— A Few Case Studies. by William Carlos Williams Carloses Williamses, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. Much recent work has focused on the death of languages worldwide. Such sad events are almost invariably attributed to a conscious decision by the speaking population to reject their language in favor of some more prestigious tongue, often in pursuit of the opportunities for education and economic advancement that the prestigious language seems to offer. In this paper, I will employ several case studies to show that another mechanism is often at work in language death: namely, that some languages reject their speakers, rather than the other way around. That ... [ more ]

Generative Speech Recognition: A competence model of ASR. by Stanislaus Gorky. Speech recognition has long posed a problem for speech scientists, phoneticians, and commercial speech researchers. In this paper I make observations on new developments in the generative program, which has great contributions to make towards speech recognition. My investigations on this matter are based on the foundational remarks on ASR made by Chomsky & Ladefoged (1968), to wit: The development of a speech recognition system SRS has fundamentally to do with the study of any language L spoken by a human H at time T. (1968: 16) Here Chomsky clearly anticipates the link between the generative program and speech recognition technology that has ... [ more ]

A Celebration of the Mesologue. A Letter from Loggerheaded Editor K’Dae K’Rim-K’Ma. As one wanders through a forest, the leaves and branches of ancient oak trees respectively whispering and creaking above one, as the slats of light slide through the slits in those self-same branches and leaves, it would be easy, would it not—one’s attention taken by the stretch upwards of this magnificent flora to the bluey domedness of the celestial tent—to miss the lowly log as it lies upon the ground? Why, we find ourselves asking each other, does the log fail to register upon the retinae, let alone the cortices, of your average human wood-wanderer? The simple answer is ... [ more ]

Multiple Choice: The Ultimate Algorithm. Gotthilf Neuerblumenfeld, Ph.D.^*. Free will being the popularly touted mainspring of all human intelligence, many have mistakenly assumed the corollary: that human achievement, in all fields, including the acquisition and use of language, must be based on freedom of choice. In fact, a high degree of constraint upon choice is a prerequisite of any viable linguistic theory. No modern school of thought assumes that a speaker chooses his words willy nilly from an infinite combination of possible phonemes or that he composes his sentences by randomly stringing along lexemes while taking careful account of inflectional requirements along the way. Such an assumption, known as the ... [ more ]

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