SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

Linguimericks, Book १८. A lovely red bird came to scoff, “Your transcriptions make everyone cough, And maybe you tweet, With all the elite, But your cardinal vowels are all off.” —Sheri Wells-Jensen, There was this young lady from Lyons Who learned perfect Spanish in Limón. Then the natives elsewhere Said her accent was bleaaargh On account of late adquisición. —Cailín na Luimní An elderly prof was once smitten With love for a language unwritten. The grad students he knew Said, on finding it true, “It’s analphabetic ’n’ unfittin’.” —P. Ublekkdeaux Meign, At the end of a hard working day, A phonologist went out to play. He ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome . Are you looking for a book about ancient Roman history that’s interesting, informative, and amusing? No? Oh. Well, all the same, as long as you’re on this webpage already, we’d like to recommend that you buy Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome. Easy to read, full of genuine historical facts, and adorned with amateurish hand-drawn pictures, The History of Rome is so good that even Girolamo Savonarola might hesitate to cast it into the flames. And best of all, it’s only $6.99! Buy one now! Interested, but wary of being burned by a slick advertising campaign for a product that fails to live up to the hype? Then download the free preview and read ... [ more ]

Mid. after-Nguyen Knap, A Brief Ontogenical Sketch. by Mandy O. Chyryry, Universidad Subordinada de Asunción. There is a little-known cluster of trade creoles that have sprung up on several islands in the Mid-Atlantic; one of these creoles, used on Ascension Island, in particular presents an interesting case of creolization of a semi-constructed language that even its native speakers cannot speak with true native fluency. When I first began my fieldwork on these creoles, I ran into several obstacles, some familiar to fieldworkers everywhere, some, I think, particular to this culture and language. For reasons I did not initially understand, speakers of Mid. after-Nguyen Knap are particularly ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, I’m sorry, I can’t recall the reference, but I remember reading somewhere of a study of infants where some 63% of the subjects were able to discriminate phonetic features in a manner consistent with an assumed geometric hierarchy of contrasts, while 11% demonstrated perceptions that violated that hierarchy in few but consistent ways. This shows, according to the authors, that the separation between mainstream and minority schools of thought in linguistics is not acquired, as many have supposed, but innate and universal. Coby Ingram — Dear Coby, You must be referring to “Is Universal Grammar Universal? Most Likely Not—So Suck It Pinker!” by ... [ 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 ]

Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, Chiasmus of the Month Awards ... This somewhat irregular award is a sign of our recognition of and deep appreciation for the authors’ contribution to the upholding of decent writing standards in academic literature and to the dissemination of the finest of speech figures. Winners are selected for ~~each~~ ~~most~~ many issues by our Chiastic Editor and Editorial Chiasturge. The honorees to date are listed below. Chiasmus of the Month; November 2025, Todd Copeland, 2024, “A Figure of Speech and a Speechless Figure: Determinations of Identity in George Sand’s Indiana and Edith Wharton’s The House of ... [ more ]

Review Article, Carmichael, James Grant III. The Structure of Bee, Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1991.. Truly a breath of fresh air in the recently-stale field of animal communication studies, Carmichael’s book is a pure delight from page one. Apart from his lucidly clear prose and strikingly funny sense of humor, this highly respected author exhibits characteristically lucid analysis and clear formulations of his obviously profound thoughts. Space allows us here to touch on only a few of the books’ many engaging features. Firstly (and certainly not lastly), it is a clear stroke of genius to give the bees in the study individual names. The reader is unconsciously caught up—without ... [ more ]

To the Fools and Sages¹ of April. A Letter from April ~~Associate~~ Executive Editor Mikael Thompson. It is often said that Valentine’s Day is a commercialized monstrosity created by the Frankensteins of the greeting card industry to make a few extra bucks as people celebrate once a year what they should celebrate every day. Similarly, Mother’s Day is a sop to the consciences of unfilial children everywhere, Elvis’s birthday is a one-off observation of the spiritual power in all of us, and Labor Day is inherently contradictory. To which we can only say, Thank Elvis Arbor Day’s just one day a year! By the same token, we at SpecGram abhor the very concept of April ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

To Be Or Not To Be Passivized. The passive has been attacked by practically every linguistic school, but it has never been conquered. Why has such a problem been presented by this enigma of language? How could the geniuses of linguistics be defeated by such a simple, though important, grammatical phenomenon? This question will be explored in the following paper. The failure of linguists to define the passive can be placed on the refusal to allow for the existence of the passive as an independent entity. It has been labeled as the opposite of the active. The active, conversely, seems to be proposed merely as a construct to classify those sentences not passivized. Circular reasoning has never been so allowed as in those theories from ... [ more ]

It Was a Dark and Stormy Noun... 1986 Edition. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Some of our more, ahem, mature readers may remember that back in the mid-80’s Speculative Grammarian ran an annual Bulwer-Lytton-style contest, asking readers to submit the worst possible opening sentence for a linguistically-themed book. In fact, some of those same readers may have submitted entries, and may still be wondering whether or not they won. Sorry about that. The contest entries were in fact judged by the editorial board, but a dispute between Pulju (a Givónian functionalist) and Slater (a Lasnikian generativist) turned uncivil and the winners were never announced. In the meantime, ... [ more ]

I U Linguistics Club. Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. June 1978. ... i u linguistics club, edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... [ more ]

Reasons to Become a Professional Linguist. Wye T’Kolr and Prof. Fess Oar, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. In an effort to attract more talent to the august profession of Linguistics, the X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies has commissioned a unique survey into the reasons why professional linguists have chosen their career. It is out hope that these will serve to inspire future generations — “Being an unprofessional linguist just didn’t hold much fascination for me anymore.” —BB, Norfolk, England “I wanted to be able to sling around enormous Greco-Latinate terms and mathematical formulae, but without the inconvenience of having ... [ 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 Quiz to End All Quizzes. ... Everyone makes Internet quizzes—even your three richest widowed aunts use their mite, if not their might, to bedazzle the gullible and amass those sweet, sweet clicks. So stand aside, ladies, SpecGram is on the ~~make~~ move! There’s a new quiz powerhouse in town, and since we don’t believe in planned obsolescence, you’ll never need nor want another!, Just answer these 17 handy-dandy mutually orthogonal questions to get the answers to all (or at least the 7 most important) of your burning questions. ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, Who is Al? All my life, I fell for the explanation that “al” was just some kind of Latin abbreviation used by scholars too apathetic to learn the names of their collaborators. (It made sense, okay? What else would you expect after years in academia?) However, it was recently brought to my attention that some students believe Al to be a very prolific writer, co-authoring thousands of papers in every discipline imaginable. After consulting with editors of second-rate publications such as Science and The Yale Law Journal, I am only partially convinced by this emerging conspiracy theory, and I am counting on you to provide a definitive answer. Is Al real, or the ... [ more ]

Strings and Things: A Unificational Meta-Theory for All Linguistics. Trent Slater. Despite the best efforts in those sciences that ignore the importance of morphological historiography,¹ it has so far proved impossible to provide one theory to rule them all. Thus, as head of the largest group of linguistic meta-theoreticians in the Whole World,² I feel that it falls to me to propose and prove a Grand Theory of Everything Linguistic. First, it is necessary to outline the main reasons for the creation of linguistic theories. According to my exhaustive research,³ there are only three rationales that require investigation. Rationale 1: Linguistic theories are invented in the vain hope ... [ more ]

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