SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 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 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 ]

Mix & Match ‖‖‖. by Max & Mitch Ninelette. The goal of this Mix & Match puzzle is to reconstitute a set of nine 9-letter words that have each had three bigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of bigrams with which to fill it up. Using each bigram once, fill the blanks in the table to form various nine-letter words. When you are done, three additional words will be revealed in the vertical direction for each puzzle. If you think you’ve figured out all the answers—that’s 24 nine-letter words!—submit your solution to the editors of SpecGram by December 15th, 2025. Solutions and solvers will be ... [ 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 ]

Arabic Numeral to Numeri++ Converter. by Daniel Swanson & Trey Jones. Cognomen 2018 (SpecGram, CLXXX.3) in footnote ‡‡† lays out “a superior, novel solution” to extending Numeri++, his science-nerd–friendly upgrade to Roman numerals, to accommodate values beyond 5,000. Below we provide a handy converter^† for the mathematically and/or typographically challenged among you who would like to use this system — ^† It appears that our buddy Prae-Prae put a little too much faith in the Unicode Consortium. Obviously any entity with “Consortium” right there in the name is not to be trusted fully. The biggest problem is that ... [ more ]

The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature. Welcome to Online Selections from The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature, researched, compiled, and edited by the lexicographers, etymologists, and philologists of Speculative Grammarian. The editors of Speculative Grammarian are delighted to present selections of the fifty-volume lexicographic opus, The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature, online for the first time ever. The Compleat Encyclopaedia is a one-of-a-kind resource, compiled ... [ more ]

Virtual NLP Dice. The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen. ... [Re-roll.] [Re-roll like you mean it !!] As many successful practitioners of Natural Language Processing know, the surest path to success is to come up with some complicated-looking equation and then rest on your mathematical laurels for the rest of your career—because “Math is hard, and hard things are for smart people, and smart people are just better. QED.” Or so we learned from the original ad for NLP Dice: “Local Linguist Mom Discovers One Weird Trick for Deriving NLP Equations!—Computational Linguists Hate Her!” (SpecGram ... [ more ]

The Assumption of Slang. It will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that cliquish groups—such as gangs, glee clubs, and various academic fields—seek group-defining language to set themselves apart from the rabble. The motivation, however, is so strong that these groups will manufacture such language if none exists, and will retro-fit existing language (eg, fat → phat) or even mistakes (teh, pwned) to create other-excluding in-group language. Well known examples include phat < fat, which has been shown to have actually originated one evening in Los Angeles, CA, when Zipperhead Johnson accidentally referred to Billy “The ... [ more ]

Parsers in the Cloud¹, Exploring the native competency and, dialectal variation of parser algorithms, with intermittent special focus on semantics, Cruella Žestókij-Grausam, Ἔλλειψις Ἀστερίσκος Πανεπιστήμιο Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Well-nigh upon fifteen years ago I was given the seemingly enviable task of analyzing the performance of an English sentence parser, produced by a company whose name rhymes with “z-rocks”. After testing several fairly innocuous sentences and receiving frustratingly ... [ more ]

— http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress Welcome to the online home of Panini Press, an academic publishing house formerly dedicated to the proposition that Linguistics is the noblest of the academic fields, but now with a focus on Subjects of more relevance to the Working Linguist’s everyday life and career. ❦पा Important announcements from Panini Press: ❧ Word Problems for Linguists (November 2025): Linguists, we here at Panini Press know you thought that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill. However, the real world often has other plans, so, for your own good, Dr. Barbara Millicent Roberts’s new book, Word ... [ more ]

IPA-to-ILPS Transcriber. by Daniel Swanson. Type International Phonetic Alphabet^* into the input box and get the corresponding Inter-Lingual Personal Script below. Or, handcraft individual consonants and vowels. See “Inter-Lingual Personal Script” (SpecGram CLXXXIX.2) for more information. Scale, Add IPA string Add Consonant Add Vowel — ^* Suprasegmentals and tones are not currently implemented. Some other parts of the IPA may also not be supported. ... [ more ]

Inter-Lingual Personal Script. Daniel Swanson. Do you ever get annoyed that the IPA has holes in it? Do you ever wish it was a bit more featural? Do you ever get lonely while writing phonetic transcriptions? So did I, and that’s why I’ve created The Inter-Lingual Personal Script (ILPS). ILPS is Featural Extensible Intuitive¹ Composed almost entirely of stick figures Consonants. Stick figures facing left indicate voiceless consonants, while those facing right indicate voiced consonants. Direction of facing is either the side on which they hold their tool or the side toward which they are pointing both arms. Plosives wear top hats, trills wear halos, taps wear crowns, fricatives keep ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

ADVERTISEMENT Smart Chimp Languages, Inc.. We Care About Our Customers as Much as You Care About Yours! . Are you tired of dealing with smarmy human translators who talk back and ask awkward questions? Are you paying more for your translations than you spend on biscuits? Do you wish you could source interpreters 24/7 for less than your subscription to Management Nonsense Quarterly? Look no further! Here at Smart Chimp Languages, we have found the ideal answer to all your interpreting and translation worries: monkeys! They are fun, they are fast and best of all, we pay them peanuts! This means we can pass the savings (and the shavings) on to you! Want to have 16,000 words translated in a single hour? No ... [ more ]

Vinegar Valentines. As Valentine’s Day rolls around once again, we at SpecGram recognize that not everyone has a special someone to spend the day with. Some people have no one; pity unto them. But the real losers on Valentine’s Day are those who have someone, just not someone who is particularly special. Whether it’s a creeper, a stalker, a jilted ex, or just a poor misguided soul who is a little too thick to take a hint, these Vinegar Valentines—a genre which rose to popularity in the late 19th century—will help you let them down, albeit none too gently. Click an image for higher resolution. ... [ more ]

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