SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 ]

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part E—Phonetics vs. Phonology. Hilário Parenchyma, C.Phil. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. We will skip the introduction, as we have been there, done that. Once more into the breach! For this installment in our series on Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, we will turn our attention to Phonetics and Phonology and the difference between the two: Phonetics:, ... Phonology:, ... Thanks to Professor Phlogiston, of the Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn, for the opportunity of a lifetime, as a student, to, on this occasion, share with so many of my fellow linguisticians my views, as illustrated above, concerning matters, which are of such immeasurable import ... [ 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 ]

Revivified 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 27th 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—Multilingualism. Discuss the following statement: “The only language difficulties experienced by most bilingual children arise simply because they are living in a mainly monolingual ... [ more ]

Language Reviews. Dr. P. Nonoir. [This month we asked avid SpecGram reader Dr. P. Nonoir, Professor of Oenological Linguistics at the Sorbonne, to review some of his favourite languages —Eds.] 2004 Sula Hindi, Airy. An attractive nose of saffron, cardamom and cumin that adds nuance to the largely mango fruit aromas of the prominent postpositional subsystem and continues onto the minty, rich and mouth coating retroflex flavours that possess a bit more mid-palate fat and an explosive, fresh and harmonious finish. I particularly like the transparency here, especially as it contrasts with the richly complex verbal morphology, and this is an exceptionally stylish effort that will age gracefully but ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

The First Report and Overview of the New Pan-global International Council for Marginalising Language (NPICML) on the execution and exclusion of all unnecessary vocabulary in the English Language. Being the first study of the use of only one global lingua franca and two basic descriptive words, including one from the exotic country of South Africa in a bid to further global diplomatic relations while annihilating almost 6 000 languages. . By the Dishonourable Sir CJ Cockspur, Head of the International Marginalising Institute’s Southern African and South African office in Johannesburg. Esteemed colleagues, it has come to the NPICML’s attention that, since the human race has fallen out of the trees and ... [ more ]

Volume 93, Number 4, December 1991 — American, Anthropophagist — Reinterpretation of 'Eat your heart out' and Other, Incorporative Metaphors in Modern English, J. Dahmer — The Planarian Ideal: Transmission of Intelligence Through the, Digestive Process, Toby Eaton — Oats is for Scots, but What About the Irish?, J. Swift — All I Really Wanted to Do Was Play Baseball With the Guys, G. Rendl — Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars: Myth or Confessional Narrative?, Kali Bhan — What Shortage? Malthus was a Dope. E. Gein — Journal of the American Anthropophagological Association, It no longer costs and arm and a leg to subscribe to our ... [ more ]

An Advance Critique of the Psammeticus Press Contrastive Grammars Series Series. Grandiloquent in its scope, unbounded in its ambition, not even quasi-mathematical in its vain hope of describing every language by setting out everything which is not that language, The Contrastive Grammar Series Series from Psammeticus Press has already become the most futile exercise in contrastive grammar, if not in all of human knowledge, ever undertaken. Place your bets now with Lloyds of London; come the year 2295, when the final volume is set to be released, you will be unable to retire to the French Riviera on the proceeds of your winning the wager that it can never be done; indeed, you may not even gain the price of a ... [ more ]

PAID ADVERTISEMENT — http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress New from Panini Press! . Word Problems for Linguists ❦पा by Barbara Millicent Roberts, Ph.D. Department of Applied Mathematical Linguistics Handler University Published 2025. 194 pg. Linguists! You’ve spent years dissecting syntax trees, contemplating the very origin of language itself, and arguing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Voynich manuscript with clueless neckbeards online—safe in the knowledge that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill—and if you have tenure, you don’t even have to do ... [ more ]

Pride, Goethe, Before the Fall. A Letter from the Managing Editor. It’s been a long, hard year in the offices of Speculative Grammarian, full of trials and tribulations. It has been especially hard on the interns; who, because of the flailing and failing global economy, have been forced (pretty much by me) to choose between having their unpaid positions replaced by a robotic coffee-and-Dead-Sea-Scroll-fetcher, and paying SpecGram for the privilege to work here. A few chose to leave. Most have chosen to take on the negative salaries, pushing SpecGram¹ out of the red. One intern, RoboFetch 2000, our unpaid machine intelligence exchange student from Toboria (we call ... [ 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 ]

The Quotta and the Quottiod. Punctuation Designed for Linguists, by Linguists. Vére Çélen, l’École de SpecGram, Cheboksary, Chuvashia. It is not news to linguists that particular forms of punctuation can be problematic. One frequent source of considerable friction in certain circles is the unending debate over whether and when (and, increasingly, why) commas and periods go inside or outside quotation marks—especially when they are not actually part of the material to be quoted. Typically careful linguists usually prefer not to include punctuation in a quoted citation form or gloss, while many punctilious punctuationally prescriptivist publishers demand they be ... [ more ]

Psammeticus Press, www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, NEW BOOK SERIES The Chiasmus Linguistics Project, presented by Psammeticus Textbooks in Linguistics, Inspired by William O. Hendricks’ 1976 classic Grammars of style and styles of grammar, Psammeticus Press presents The Chiasmus Linguistics Project, which offers important, cleverly titled books on a wide variety of meaningful linguistic topics in linguistically meaningful fields that vary as widely as the books which both are titled so cleverly and are so important. Recent titles include: The Foundations of Morphology and the Morphology of Foundations: An exploratory exploration, by Teresa Anna Garcia Lopez and Ana Theresa Lopes ... [ more ]

Grammaticalization in an Inflationary System of Signs, (Or: Excerpts from The Swollen Tongue). Frederic de Saucisson. [Frederic de Saucission is best known as the Gulf Coast Functionalist who removed that school of thought from the realm of the esoteric to mainstream linguistics. Less often is he remembered as the Polish composer who emigrated to Louisiana and gained a modicum of fame from such noted Cajun operas as Il Pleut Plus and Permis de Pêcher. But, in fact, de Saucission's career in linguistics was a late development, and he spent the first forty years of his life as a composer and lyricist. Unfortunately, though his musical works were remarkable, de Saucisson had great ... [ 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 ]

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