SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

How to Pay for Linguistic Fieldwork. by the SpecGram Editorial Board. The thing is is that fieldwork is expensive, and yet we have to somehow pay for it. Or we won’t get to do it. And really, heaven help the poor soul who can’t pay for a trip even to Tahiti, and has to try to come up with some topic on English syntax that hasn’t already been beaten like a dead metaphor. At SpecGram, our interest is is to help people in this kind of situation. So, in the interest of new data (or, should we say, in the interest of no more old English data), and out of a sense of selfless devotion to the betterment of Ph.D. students all across Linguistica, the SpecGram editorial board has pulled together ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT The Γραμματο-Χαοτικον Long-Term Care Facility for Decommissioned Mad Social Scientists. Has your linguist, anthropologist, or historian gotten to be too much for you to handle at home? We at the ΓΧ Facility understand your mad social scientist’s needs and desires. They just want someone to appreciate that their theories are just so perfect, and that if the data doesn’t fit, the world must be changed to make it fit. We know. We understand. And we can help. Our highly trained staff will implement as many of your mad social scientist’s desired real-world changes as is feasible, ... [ more ]

How Many Languages Do You Speak?. Nate F. Spee-Curr & Nonné Divz Bīīqr, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. It’s an age-old question, and despite our field’s best efforts, it’s also one that won’t go away. So, instead of just complaining about the question, we decided to go out and find some actual answers. The results are provided below. Archiphonemicist: I speak |language|—that is, an appropriately underspecified version of all of them. Chomskyan: Universal Grammar shows that all languages are equivalent. Computational Linguist: There’s Basic, Fortran, Matlab, C++, VHDL, Java, Python, Javascript and, ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXIX, Number 2 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief Keith Slater, Executive Editor, Associate Editors, Pete Bleackley Jonathan Downie Mikael Thompson, Assistant Editors, Virginia Bouchard Mark Mandel Yuval Wigderson, Editorial Associates, Adam Baker Florian Breit Bethany Carlson Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Anita G. Gorman Siva Kalyan Tel Monks Mary Shapiro Bill Spruiell Sheri Wells-Jensen, Joey Whitford, Comptroller General All the Theory You Can Eat June 2017 ... [ more ]

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Kean Kaufmann. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds briefly discuss some innovative bits of English Grammar—no, totally!—and then try out some new parlor games featuring archaic English words. ... [ listen ]

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, but no, seriously, we’ve published a large collection of SpecGram articles, along with just enough new material to force obsessive collectors and fans to buy it, regardless of the cost. From the Introduction: The past twenty-five years have witnessed many changes in linguistics, with major developments in linguistic theory, significant expansion in language description, and even ... [ more ]

The Phonetician’s Love Poem. Epiphanios o Phantasiopliktos. Sweet modulations of fundamental frequency, Air particles dancing to and fro, Greeting each other as they pass, Alongside soft tissue and mucous membrane, Playing airily on varying wavelengths, And somewhere in my inner ear, Ossicles and hair cells take up the call, Now a firework of neuronal excitement, As this voice of yours, a memory though, Soft, sweet, soothing sounds, So lovely, so charming, such delight, Oh! never fades from my mind. ... [ more ]

Quotes: What People are Saying. Here are a few of our favorite things people have said about Speculative Grammarian over the years, collected wild on the internet, or domesticated in email — Q1064. Der Unterschied zwischen der Phonetik und Phonologie ist anschaulich und zugleich unterhaltsam auf dieser Karikatur in der satirischen Online-Zeitschrift Speculative Grammarian (2007, 153-1) dargestellt —Diana Šileikaitė-Kaishauri — Q1063. Speculative Grammarian is a notorious satirical linguistics site —Darkgamma — Q1062. I read this thinking it was serious by accident —Handsomeyellow47 — Q1061. Seems like SpecGram has been ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian and SpecGram.com. Our Story. The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields. SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

Rebus. by Wulfila Bruinne, M.F.A. Ph.D. University of North Oodaaq. This puzzle is worth 3 points. ... Lingo Jumble—Orang Pendek, D.Sc. and Orang Mawas, Litt.D. ... E’s-y Cryptogram—Prof. Dr. phil. habil. Erlösende Einigkeit, ... SpecGram Vol CLVII, No η Contents, ... [ more ]

Summer Puzzle Mega Issue Solutions. Scrambled Linguist—Trey Jones ნიკოლოზ იაკობის ძე მარი (though “Nicholas Marr” was also accepted). ... Self-Defining Puzzle—Swivelhips Smith, D.Phil. NP vs Np # is rotated 90° S vs Q at root .—? vs ? differences vs diferences two vs 2 line length for MD—Can Knights of the Linguistic Roundtable—Fergus Falls-Brainerd VOICELESSNESS Lingo Jumble—Orang Pendek, D.Sc. and Orang Mawas, Litt.D. ... [ more ]

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