SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

Draw Me a Linguist. Aster E. O’Gnosis and Margo Llicso. Much has been made recently in certain circles of the stereotypical views children have of scientists, and how those views are changed after paying a visit to CERN—all reflected in the drawings of the children. (Drollette, 2010) The cliché says that children are our future, and the humanizing effect of the CERN visit on children’s perceptions may eventually be parlayed into an increase in the number of young people who choose to pursue science as a profession, which of course results in better enrollment in college courses, and thus more funding for science departments. We figured linguistics could probably use some of that action, too. ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Youth Research Focus is proud to bring you the finest language-related research by the world’s school-aged youth. Grey Duck or Goose?, Mapping variation in a children’s game in Minnesota. Fifth Grade Science Fair Project, by Sven Slater and Ollie Bickford, J. O. Nelson Public School, St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Research Question. Last year, a new kid named Tyler P. joined our fourth grade class. Tyler was from Illinois or some other southern state, and she told us that down there kids play “duck, duck, goose,” instead of “duck, duck, grey duck” like we do here in Minnesota. We thought this was strange, even for the South, but then we ... [ more ]

Review of John Stuart Mill and the Temple of Doom . Vervet Vandiver Vanlandingham-Vanderveer, Lecturer, School of Linguistic Appreciation and Dialectal Dialectics, University of Even More Northern British Columbia, Atlin. ... This weekend I went to see the new high-spectacle action-adventure film, John Stuart Mill and the Temple of Doom. While the special effects were noteworthy, I was most impressed by the reflorescence, if not recrudescence, of Hollywood linguistics. Intended as a high-brow response to the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, this film begins with the hero recovering from his once-famed nervous breakdown by defeating Tennyson in a poetry slam during the Great Exhibition; while ... [ more ]

Obituary. Prof. Simon M. Tating, 63, of Farborough, passed away 19th; November 2012 attempting to learn the pronunciation of certain Bantu words involving various voiceless implosive phonemes. Professor Tating was born in South Africa, 12th January 1949. He moved to England early in his youth with his parents where he later attended the University of London and received his PhD in Rare African Phonemic Contrastual Studies in 1978. Until his death he occupied the chair of Experimental Meta-Phonotactics at the Institute for Sub-Saharan and Other Studies and was much renowned for his pioneering work into imitatory exploration of impossible or near-impossible phonetic and phonotactic articulatory combinatorics. Professor ... [ more ]

Crossword. by Doug Files. Answers will be printed in the next edition of The Journal, of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia. Crossword for Linguists. Across, 1, Ndonga for man’s apron made of the first stomach of a ruminant, 6, Tiv for the midpoint of the lower surface of a male organ, 10, Kiniasa for beads, 17, Zulu for get apportioned, 18, German for license, 19, Breton for crucible, 20, Malay for bad stomach pains, 21, English for make habituated, 22, Hiliagaynon for Chinese, 23, Oslo-accented English our, 24, Zulu for events to come, 26, Ndumu for go quietly, 28, Spanish for torch, 29, ... [ more ]

Man in the Black Box. A Letter from the Managing Editor. One of my great-grandchildren (I honestly forget which one, as there are so many now—three, perhaps four of them, and they descend upon me like a ravening horde) recently purchased a device called an “eye pod” for me. It makes noise; the ravening horde claim it is music, but I detect neither harmony nor melody in the selections that were “preloaded” on it for my “enjoyment”. Through an unfortunate series of button pressings, I have somehow gotten the infernal contraption into such a state that it is only able to render a single “song” entitled “Man in the Box” by an ensemble known as ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, The middle voice demonstrates clearly in “On How Middle Voice Should Not Constrain for Syntax” (Volume CLXIX, Number 1; January 2014). My current research benefits! Thanks on behalf of, Mary Galbraith ... Dear Mary, If the article entertains and enlightens, others can entertain and enlighten as well: An excellent article on the passive voice was written by Joel Boyd. (Ps.Q. XVI.2) Yreka Bakery an article a stunning speech disorder center embedding was caused by described wrote. (SpecGram CLI.2) Claude Searsplainpockets wrote-wrote-wrote with astounding eloquence (yeah! yeah! yeah!) about the hyp-hyp-hyperactive voice. (SpecGram ... [ more ]

Official SpecGram Poem: The Search Goes On. By Poetical Editor Laurie Att. Our reader will be well aware from the footnote 63 in the AGM crypto-encoded classified minutes of 2009 that a global search for an Official SpecGram Poem has been underway for 15 years. In this editorial, we take the opportunity to update our reader on the progress so far. Over the last decade-and-a-half, we’ve been inundated by seven submissions. On closer inspection, three of them appeared to be letters addressed to others which may have gone astray but we kept that cash and cashed the cheques anyway—thanks! Of the other four, one was written in a northern dialect of British English and ... [ more ]

A comment on Mr Slater’s (be)musings on Pinnacle Sherpa. by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira. I have been following, with meticulous attention and growing alarm, Mr Keith Slater’s (2006, 2010a, 2010b, 2011a, 2011b) self-labelled “description” of features of Pinnacle Sherpa and, disquietingly, of its users. If what Mr Slater offers can be called a description, then I am Miss Universe. I am not concerned with Mr Slater’s dilettante skills in tree drawing, or ditto acrobatics in back-and-forthing reconstruction of historical changes, whether in spoken or logographic modes. Like all elite researchers, I completely ignore what is going on beyond my own academic backyard-cum-lab. ... [ more ]

Doris. Plato. After an impromptu search in the SpecGram library, we were surprised but elated to find a batch of additional Platonic dialogues on linguistic matters. Plato’s Socrates often passes the time on trivial matters of ethics, justice and all that jazz. Happily for us, the discoveries in the library are all linguistical. Here, then, in a world first publication, is Plato’s Doris. Protagonists: Socrates Antiphon Doris of Miletus Antiphon: ... to which my answer was of course ‘only if a hoplite were in charge’! Socrates: Ha ha ha! Not unfunny. Antiphon: Thanks, Sox. Socrates: So, yeah. How was the rest of the evening? Antiphon: Well, ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. Hello People, I am not a scientist of any sort, but have been looking to see if there has been a study on the memory phenomenon of instantly forgetting a name when one is introduced. I have been listening for some time to many people of all ages saying that they forget a name when introduced, “as though it went in one ear & out the other”. Why do humans so consistently ‘dump’ a name from memory this way? Could you please tell me if you know of any such study? If there isn’t, it might be interesting to do one. I enjoyed reading about the woman naming her offspring in sequences to get at the right one, and how that was structured to save space. Very interesting. Thank you for your ... [ more ]

Gavagai with Peppers (serves 4) Many tasty gavagai recipes were brought from the jungle by linguists and missionaries in the first half of the 20^th century. After the publication of Quine’s Word and Object they gained popularity among philosophers, though the book’s underlying idea was soon attacked from linguistic circles. As an unfortunate consequence, gavagai recipes emanating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tend to be inedible. In most gavagai recipes quantities are vague, as is the exact nature of the meat to be used. Many recipes prescribe sundry undetached rabbit parts as a basic ingredient. The following is an exception. Ingredients 800g of properly detached rabbit parts ... [ more ]

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor. Once again our long-time colleague and comrade/editor-in-arms Mikael Thompson has provided some high-quality summer reading material (and in this case a novel’s worth of quantity, to boot) for the discriminating fan of linguistic themed fiction. Strangecraft is a slow-burning weird tale, a detailed, personal story told against a stygian, cosmic-scale backdrop. The narrator wends his way through the wilds of post-Subsidence New England in search of an advanced degree in linguistics, but both he and the reader find considerably more than they bargained for in and around the environs of the Miskatonic Institute of Technology, as numerous ... [ more ]

Domiphones II. Keith Slater & Trey Jones. Traditional Dominosa is a puzzle game that requires you to pair numbers corresponding to the faces of dominoes. You are presented with a rectangular grid of numbers. Each number must be paired with one of its vertical or horizontal neighbors. As in a set of dominoes, each numerical value pairs exactly once with each other numerical value. See the original “Domiphones and Dominasals” (SpecGram CLXXXV.1) for a simple example if you are unfamiliar with the genre. Naturally, SpecGram’s version of the puzzle involves some linguistics-related twists. Rather than boring and obvious numerals, we use symbols that linguists can enjoy and feel comfortable ... [ more ]

Linguistic Emissions Reduction Sought. SpecGram Wire Services. Sanaa, Yemen—Tempers flared at global climate talks today, as environmental and linguistic concerns met head-on. The dispute is about so-called “inefficient articulations,” which detractors say increase the metabolic cost of speaking, while offering no linguistic benefit to speakers. These articulations, such as the large transition between the uvular [q] and palatal [i] in the Arabic surname Sadeqi, require more metabolic energy than most other segmental transitions, and are contributing to global warming, detractors say. More difficult sounds require greater metabolic effort, which leads to higher ... [ more ]

The Grapholinguist. by Davis Prickett. Number of IPA Symbols Mastered vs People Who Think You Are Normal / Impressive Party Tricks ... [ more ]

Sleeping Furiously Since 1986 — Hamlet Tries Praat. by Laura Ryals. A [b]... or not a [b]... Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and I think it’s his sampling rate. ... [ more ]

“Interpretez seront les extipices”, On the Correct Interpretation of Nostradamus, Part the Third. by Roger Prentiss Claremont, ~~Independent~~ Sovereign Scholar. In Parts the First and Second of this series, we discussed the basis of our new interpretation of the prophetic verses of Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), usually known as Nostradamus. His verses have eluded definitive interpretation for several centuries, and this series shows that that is because earlier interpretations made the basic error of assuming his verses were in French. In fact, they are better interpreted as English encoded in French. This part shall complete the task of interpretation of selected verses, after which we shall turn ... [ more ]

University News. TV Chef and Government Boffins Spruce Up Linguini with Linguistics. by Ruthlessly Roving Reporter Miss Deakina Andrea Kirkhamia Celebrity chef Claudesia van O’Hara, famous for her pioneering reality TV cheffing programme Cook-a-Doodle-Doo, has teamed up with linguists from the Southport Institute of Language Investigation and the Basildon Institute of Linguistic Inquiry (SILI-BILI) to investigate how lexical and grammatical constructs can add, in her words, “taste, tone, texture and adventure” to food and cooking. In a series of six programmes, O’Hara will be mixing standard linguistic constructs such as place of ... [ more ]

Palinilap Cimordromic, Center Embedded Passives. Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük, Universitätsphilosoph, University of Qaanaaq, Greenland. Across the world, increased intercultural contact via business dealings has led to the spread not only of English and other linguæ francæ of business, but also of business cultures. In many industries and geopolitical zones, the two main competitors in the marketplace of ideas are Japanese-style corporate and personal responsibility (up to and including seppuku, as needed) and American-style quicksilver-like shifting of blame. Unsurprisingly, the American way is winning out, in large part because it is ... [ more ]

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