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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 ]
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 ]
“Double-Dot Wide O / Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill” by J–––– J––––––. From Speculative Grammarian CLI.3; July 2006. Reviewed by Jonathan van der Meer. ... Double-Dot Wide O, Spoiler Alert !. It’s been more than eight years, so I’m going to go ahead and let you in on a little secret: the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill is a pig snort, and the double-dot wide O looks like a pig snout. (Some phoneticians will argue that they themselves produce a uvular trill. They probably do—especially when reading journals less interesting than SpecGram—but ... [ more ]
Overheard* in the Linguistics Student Lounge. Chesterton “Chico” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV, Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers**, Second-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton All names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent. Jargonisation: Conjecture: The linguists with people skills become interpreters. Those without people skills become translators. Those who are uncomfortable with “people” being used adjectivally become language teachers. Those who were diagramming those sentences and griping about the use of the word “linguist” to ... [ 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 ]
ADVERTISEMENT SpecGram Estates. A Retirement Community By Linguists, For Linguists1. The second greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become tenured—the status, the glory, the freedom! The greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become emeritus—the status, the glory, the freedom! Come and spend your golden years with us at SpecGram Estates; we understand you like no one else does, and we have the accommodation, the community, and the amenities that are just right for you! We all know that different linguists have different expectations of the world. At SpecGram Estates we personalize your retirement experience, creating ... [ more ]
SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CXCV, Number 3; February 2026, C HIEF C AT H ERDER &, A RBITER OF THE L AST W ORD, Trey Jones, O RDER OF THE, S PECULATIVE P SAMMETICOI, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, Tim Pulju, Bill Spruiell, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXCV, No 3, H EAD OF L EARNING, L INGUISTICS T HROUGH, S ATIRE AND P UNS, Jonathan Downie, S YNTACTICO- P OET &, U NDER- E DITOR OF, U NDER- E DITING, Deak Kirkham, S ENIOR P UZZLING, T EST P ILOT, Vincent Fish, K EEPER OF THE, E DITORIAL T EA C ADDY, Pete Bleackley, A SSOCIATE D EPUTY, A SSISTANT S UB- M ANAGER, OF S ATIRICAL S UCCESS, Luca Dinu, O RTHOGRAPHER- A T- L ARGE, Daniel Swanson, D ILETTANTE E MERITUS, Tel ... [ 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 ]
Unproven 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 60th 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. Fieldwork Project II— Reporting Fieldwork. On the use of two discourse particles in a local variety of English. One of our informants works in the Hospitality Profession. From our research, it was exhibited that ... [ 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 ]
A Short History of American Linguistics*. Tim Pulju. Reprinted, with permission, from Historiographia Linguistica, XVIII:1.221-246 (1991), with minor updates and a new afterword by the author. *It has occurred to the Editor of this Journal [Historiographia Linguistica] that the History of Linguistics as an academic subject has sufficiently progressed during the past fifteen or more years to allow for this spoof to be printed in HL without being mistaken for proper scholarship. Indeed, after all the drudgery of historical research and the seriousness of reflection on matters of methodology and philosophical argument, we may be permitted to enjoy some lighter moments in our day-to-day ... [ 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 ]
Optimality Theory Was a Hoax, Prince and Smolensky finally come clean . SpecGram Wire Services. At a tearful news conference during the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Allen Prince confessed that Optimality Theory was a hoax. “I just can’t live with the lies any longer,” he said. The admission follows years of accusations by linguists who doubted that OT actually existed. The drumbeat of suspicions grew louder, but both Prince and his collaborator Paul Smolensky steadfastly maintained not only that they had created OT but that in fact a large number of practicing linguists were employing the theory in their professional work. OT, Prince explained, was originally ... [ 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 ]
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Last updated Mar. 16, 2026.