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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 ]
A Student’s Guide to the History of Linguistics, Based on Example Sentences. Franz Neumayer. The following sentences exemplify important concepts in linguistics, and relate them to the linguists whose names are most associated with their development. They are provided as a service to MA students reviewing for comprehensive exams. If you do not understand how each sentence exemplifies its concept, or why these particular names are included, you need to re-read the relevant articles. This list will be expanded in future years. Readers are invited to submit additional examples. Accessibility Hierarchy Keenan and Comrie are the people by whom the accessibility hierarchy was described. Bloomfieldian Linguistics ... [ 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 ]
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 ]
Linguistic Cocktails Prepared and extensively taste-tested, by the SpecGram Mixologists. Interest in cocktails has had a resurgence lately, with people trying new combinations and reviving forgotten blends. We shouldn’t forget the long history the grand subfield of Mixological Linguistics has. Below is a mix of old favorites and new delights. The Newmeyer 1 martini, dry, with olive 1 gin and tonic ... Disparage the martini vigorously for ten to twenty years, arguing that no real establishment should serve it. Urge everyone to drink gin and tonic (“the one true cocktail”) instead. Redefine “gin and tonic” so that it can refer to lots of things other than a cocktail that has gin in ... [ more ]
How Linguistics Got Her Groove Back1. Gunnr Guðr Entgegenlächeln, FG Klopstock Universiteit. Common wisdom—an oxymoron if ever there was one—has it that linguistics and linguists themselves have a bit of a reputation problem. Are linguists boring? Incomprehensible? Pointless? Evil? The contention of this paper is—given that perception is nine-tenths of reality—unless we ask, we’ll never know. To that end, I conducted a survey, which took place at a cocktail party, where there were many linguists and many non-linguists who were not particularly well-acquainted with linguistics. I interviewed 3 (±0.15) ... [ 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 ] 
Fables of Linguistics, The Story of the Weak Vowels. The Tale Teller of Tollerton Town. Whose is that voice in the distance, singing? The Tale Teller of Tollerton Town! But it’s more of a growl than a clear tone ringing— Though admittedly he’s been up dale (and then down). He’s been telling tales since before the beginning, Though he makes it all up and he can’t really spell— And most of his Tales deserve a good binning. But he’s here now! I wonder what Tale he will Tell. Once upon a time in Vowel Town, a wide-open space next door to the busy, noisy, clucking and clicking of Consonant City, there lived a happy community of vowels. Some were quite open and were unafraid to discuss ... [ 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 ]
The Linguistic Big Freeze. by John Tipler and Frank J. Barrow, Omega Point Open University. It is with some disappointment that we feel obligated to submit this article to the previously respectable Speculative Grammarian, which has now been demoted to the position of Purveyor of Meta-Tripe. We agree with most of Block’s (2010) explanation of the Linguistic Big Bang, but vigorously disagree with his contention of an impending Linguistic Big Crunch. We agree with most of Saygone’s (2010) tripe-related criticism of Block’s Linguistic Big Crunch, but vigorously disagree with his contention of an impending Linguistic Big Rip. Both of these theoretical models served linguophysicists in their ... [ 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 ]
Hey Linguists!—Get Them to Get You a Copy of The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics . Hey Linguists! Do you know why it is better to give than to receive? Because giving requires a lot more work! You have to know what someone likes, what someone wants, who someone is, to get them a proper, thoughtful gift. That sounds like a lot of work. No, wait. That’s not right. It’s actually more work to be the recipient—if you are going to do it right. You can’t just trust people to know what you like, what you want, who you are. You could try to help your loved ones understand a linguist’s needs and wants and desires—but ... [ more ]
The Scrabble Cheaters’ Dictionary. provided as a service to our readers, by Speculative Grammarian. Have you ever backed yourself into a corner, lexicographically speaking—while playing Scrabble, or chatting around the water cooler at work, or telling tall tales at the pub? The story is an unfortunate but familiar one: a linguist, polyglot, or other linguaphile finds themselves in the heady position of declaiming to the untutored masses on the subject of a particular word, only to realize that perhaps they’ve over-reached, and no such word exists. A standard fallback position in such a situation is to claim certainty that the word in question—while the details may ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian CLASSIFIEDS FOR SALE ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ FIRE SALE!, EVERYTHING IN THIS, STORAGE UNIT MUST GO!, Poulsen Telegraphones (2), Kay Sona-Graph DSP 5500, Electro Voice 630 V2 microphones (3); IBM 5100 Personal Computer; Eugene Dietzgen Company Improved Mannheim Simplex Slide Rules (4), XT Uzi/Reel-to-Reel Recorders (3); Miscellaneous logarithm tables and nomographs of various vintages. PRICES NEGOTIABLE. NO NARCS!, Contact UGOLINO, SG Box 5668. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ For sale, common sense theories, never used. Contact Wm. Jones, SG Box 9–28. For sale, 47 lightly used sets ... [ more ]
Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are They Ever!. by, April May June, Freshman in Elementary Education, Indiana University at Bloomington. It is — "Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — well-known from my L103 class that Turkish and Amharic supposedly aren't related, though it is no longer clear which languages they are related to. However, I have found lots of words in the two languages which sound alike and mean the same thing in only two months of hearing them spoken in two local restaurants. The similarities first caught my attention during an argument at the Turkish restaurant in which the owner kept saying "sought." ... [ more ]
World of Language. The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia. Volume I, Number 2. February 1991. World of Language: The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, ... [ more ]
Welcome to the Empire of Earth™*, Membership Application, Part 17.b, Linguistics, Subsection 4, Appendix II v.2161 (revised 2401, 2619, 2993). Advice for Creating Your Orthography. One of the most overlooked issues that species new to the Empire of Earth™ have to grapple with is their relative lack of standing within the Empire. Contrary to all expectations at the time, humanity solved all of its major issues centuries ago, long before expanding beyond our home planet. There is no hunger, no illness, no war. We cleaned up our infestation of elongated muskrats and deported them all back to their home world of Beta Dweebulon Zero—which has since been quarantined. We seem to have ... [ more ]
The Devil’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. by David Krystal, Compiled by Adam Baker. C-command. A f-formal r-relationship m-made n-necessary by an u-unfortunate e-early c-commitment to b-binary t-trees. Computational linguistics. A sub-discipline of linguistics practiced by malicious killjoys who have no regard for the claims and generalizations of others. Consonant. A category of segment often occurring between vowels. See entry for vowel. Glottochronology. A misguided effort to measure the rate of linguistic change objectively. The only ridiculous linguistic theory to date to be widely acknowledged as such. Grammar, Generative. An approach to linguistics ... [ more ]
Minimal Forests: The Threat Of Linguistic, Devastation As A Result of Deforestation. GOALS:, The purpose of this paper is to explain the subtle but powerful relationship between language and the environment. We will be using the subtle but powerful method of mathematical induction, and examining the subtle but powerful concept of minimal pairs in establishing phonemic contrasts in a language. EVIDENCE:, Consider the following minimal sets from two totally unrelated languages, Sindhi and Thai: (1), Sindhi, pənu 'leaf', phənu 'snake hood', bənu 'forest', (2), Thai, pàa 'forest', phàa 'to split', bàa 'shoulder', Notice that in both ... [ more ]
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Last updated Feb. 1, 2026.