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1. Ministry of Propaganda (8 visits)

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 ]


2. Vol CLXV, No 4 (8 visits)

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 ]


3. Merchandise (7 visits)

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 ]


4. Archives (4 visits)

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 ]


5. Spelling Reform: As seen through the eyes of a child—Yan-Ying Mottainai and Madingle Hopper (4 visits)

Spelling Reform, As seen through the eyes of a child. Yan-Ying Mottainai and Madingle Hopper, Midwestern University of the Midwest. There have been many arguments for, against, around, counter to, and in the general vicinity of English spelling reform over the years, decades, and centuries. Ultimately, none have had much success, other than the lexicographic disaster perpetrated by Noah Webster, who only complicated matters by increasing the divide between UK and US speakers of English. We had long since given up hope of any acceptable form of prescriptive spelling reform, holding on to only the faintest glimmer of optimism with regard to natural spelling change, which, over the generations, might “cre8 a consistenter ... [ more ]


6. Revivified Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (3 visits)

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 ]


7. Ps. Q.—Vol XVI, No 2 (3 visits)

PSAMMETICUS QUARTERLY. C U R R E N T R E S E A R C HI N A L L, L I N G U I S T I C F I E L D S. MANAGING EDITORS: Tim Pulju, Keith Slater, CONSULTING EDITORS: Joel Boyd, Charles Cairns, Doug Files, Dave Kathman, Carol Miller, Wo-Tak Ng, JUNIOR EDITORS: (probationary status), Barbara Abbott, Ruth Brend, David Dwyer, John Eulenberg, Julia Falk, Carolyn Harford, Grover Hudson, Thomas Juntune, David Lockwood, James Stalker, UNCONNECTED WITH THIS JOURNAL: Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.), J.R. Firth, Larry Hagman, Claude Monet, Xerxes, King of Persia (ret.), ... [ more ]


8. On the Interpreting Ability of Non-Human Members of Kingdom Animalia—Prof Trent Slater & Dr Imma Gauld-Fishe (3 visits)

On the Interpreting Ability of Non-Human Members of Kingdom Animalia. Prof Trent Slater & Dr Imma Gauld-Fishe, Centre for Linguistic Arts & Social Sciences, University of In-k-Stain, Ballpoint, Pennsylvania. Introduction. While research on machine interpreting is ongoing,1 few researchers have delved into the arguably more interesting subject of animal interpreting. To resolve this lacuna2 our specialist team set up a simple simultaneous interpreting task and generated qualitative data3 on their performance. The table below details our findings. Animal, Performance, Comparison to Humans, Dog, Ran around chasing its tail, gnawed on the wiring into the ... [ more ]


9. About Us (3 visits)

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 ] Podcast!


10. Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca—Regarding the Development and Decay of Mongolian Vowel Harmony: with Special Reference to Copernicus and Galileo—Robert I. Binnick (3 visits)

Regarding the Development and Decay of Mongolian Vowel Harmony: with Special Reference to Copernicus and Galileo. Robert I. Binnick, University of Toronto. The linguist is the one ... who refers to Copernicus, and Galileo in a paper on Mongolian vowel harmony —James D. McCawley, in Son of Lingua Pranca, One of the more obscure facts concerning the Polish astronomer-mathematician known as Copernicus is that in 1526, almost three quarters of a century before Gresham proposed his “law” regarding the replacement in the marketplace of good (i.e. undebased) coinage by bad (debased), Copernicus presented a similar theory in his book Monetae cudendae ratio, which was not published in his ... [ more ]


11. Mix & Match ◊◊—Max & Mitch Ninelette (3 visits)

Mix & Match ◊◊. by Max & Mitch Ninelette. The goal of this Mix & Match puzzle is to reconstitute a set of nine 9-letter words that have each had two trigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of trigrams with which to fill it up. Using each trigram once, fill the blanks in the table to form various nine-letter words. When you are done, three additional words will be revealed in the vertical direction for each puzzle. If you think you’ve figured out all the answers—that’s 24 nine-letter words!—submit your solution to the editors of SpecGram by August 1st, 2024. Solutions and solvers will be announced in ... [ more ]


12. Eating the Wind—An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Xoŋry—Claude Searsplainpockets (3 visits)

Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another increasingly regular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. Eating the Wind. An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Xoŋry 0. Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 58, Introduction. The people who call themselves “the Xoŋry ” comprise not a single people and language, but rather a surprisingly large constellation of small, related tribes1 speaking a surprisingly large constellation of large, related languages.2 The Xoŋry are spread over several thousand square miles of desolate and mostly unclaimed territory ... [ more ] Book!


13. Ps. Q.—A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese—Tim Pulju (3 visits)

A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese. It has long been a tenet of stratificational theory that stratificational notation is adaptable to extralinguistic structures. The contention of this paper is that not only can we use relational networks in this way, but that in fact a stratificational diagram is superior to, and should supplant, the traditional tool for visual transmission of information, namely written representation of natural human language. As an example, compare the traditional version of instructions for preparing macaroni and cheese with the new and improved version. (The text is that of “Directions,” Food Club Macaroni and Cheese Dinner, Wgt. .453# (the package is distributed by ... [ more ] Merch! Book!


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Last updated Mar. 1, 2026.