SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Classifying an Andean Language. Introduction: This is not a polished paper: rather, it is a preliminary report which I have rushed into publication because of the extremely shocking and significant information which it contains. I felt that the linguistic world would want to know of my results immediately, despite the fact that I have only just begun my research. Description of Research: For several years I have been working on describing various Quechuan dialects to be found in the Andean fastnesses of northwest Bolivia. The indigenous population dwells for the most part in small villages of usually less than one hundred people, and sometimes considerably fewer. It was during the course of this investigation that one ... [ more ]

Tagmemics of Stratificationalism. R.W. Jackson, Akron, Ohio, USA. Stratificational is a language of the Nonchomskyan branch of the Linguistic family. It is spoken by a small and, by some estimates, dwindling number of native speakers—at least, the number seems to have declined somewhat since the late 1960’s, although there are enough young people still using the language that it does not seem to be in danger of extinction any time in the near future. It’s closest relatives within the Linguistic family appear to be Glossematic, Bloomfieldian (especially the Hockettsian dialect), and perhaps Systemic. Surface typological similarities between Stratificational and such Chomskyan dialects as Autolexical and ... [ more ]

Language—The Failure of Modern Philosophy. Dr. Georg Strudelfest, Leipzig, Germany. The musings of the great human philosophers have often gravitated toward the illusivity of natural language. With the coining of the brilliant Cartesian “vēnī vīdī vīcī ” the scope of the philosophical investigation was deftly expanded to incorporate the very medium of communication employed by lord and peasant, by educated and oppressed alike—human speech. The relentless lumens of such powerful minds as Plato and Pythagoras could not but penetrate the determined darkness that had enshrouded that which had remained mysterious. The investigative feeding frenzy spawned by ... [ more ]

Our Readers Mouth Off. *Editor’s note—all replies to readers’ letters are written by the Editor-in-Chief. Views of other members of the editorial staff are likely to be more intelligent than those expressed here. In fact, forget likely to be—the truth is, you can count on it. & & & To whoever really writes Babel: Who is Tim Pulju? He can’t really be the editor of Babel, since running a photocopier requires at least a modicum of intelligence. Why has he never published any articles in journals that most linguists have actually heard of? Is he really a linguist, or just an escaped mental patient, as his writing seems to indicate? Or does he even ... [ more ]

A Warning for Linguists. We in linguistics are well-accustomed, by now, to the fact that other disciplines—notably the “hard” sciences—regularly upstage us and grab all the glory in the public eye. Normally, this doesn’t, and shouldn’t, bother us in the least, because aside from the fact that the other guys get most of the NSF grants (to say nothing of the SDI grants) the consequences of this are minimal. They do their thing; we do ours. Everybody gets tenure. Now, however, a movement is underway, particularly among astrophysicists, of which we cannot afford to not sit up and take notice. This threat is called, in the perpetrators’ own argot, the “unified ... [ more ]

Son of Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. IULC. November 1979. ... edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Son of, ^ Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... i u linguistics club, ... [ more ]

Greek Particles. Two facts well-known to linguists for many years are that Ancient Greek orthography represented speech much more closely than does modern English orthography, or practically any other modern European orthography, and that speech, unlike writing, is full of hesitations, false starts, and meaningless expletive utterances which are not recorded in writing. For instance, In English, a typical spoken text might be: Well, it’s the, umm... you know, the one that, uh, you got from the store across the street. We can make a number of interesting observations about the meaningless expletives in the above and in similar texts, of which the interested reader can collect many more examples, if he is so inclined. The ... [ more ]

Change A Little, Change A Lot Challenge. An Orthographophonetical Puzzle. Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur &, The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants—and not all of them—have any agreed speech value. —George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion As Shaw so eloquently states, the English alphabet is hardly fit for purpose. Its alleged rules are, at best, suggestions. This unholy mess we find ourselves in the middle of has a few redeeming qualities. It’s given us ... [ 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 ]

B A B E L, “Ta men, ta de, te kai ta alla.”. Volume I Number 2, April 1990. Babel is published every once-in-a-while by the Worldwide Linguistic Society, which is not a subsidiary of Amway Enterprises. Copies of Babel are available from distribution agents around the world, many of whom have never been convicted of a major felony. For more information about Babel, write to the Editor-in-Chief, Tim Pulju, at this address: Dept. of Linguistics and Semiotics; Rice University; P.O. Box 1892; Houston, TX 77251. Babel actively encourages submissions on any linguistic or quasi-linguistic topic. Submissions (which need not be articles—poems, cartoons, ... [ more ]

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 ]

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 ]

De La SpecGrammatologie . A Letter to Future Historians of Satirical Linguistics, from the Editor-in-Chief, Trey “Jacquey D” Jones. Future SpecGrammologists will debate whether this period in the history of SpecGram is “Early Modern” or “Late Moron” or even “Proto-Interplanetary”—and whether we were titans or pipsqueaks, our scribblings impactful or inconsequential. They will undoubtedly furrow their collective brow as they attempt to decipher the opaque and recalcitrant tea leaves of some future tattered remains of the SpecGram archive and hazard ill-formed guesses at our true meaning and significance. ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXXIII, Number 2 Brought to you by... Occam’s Safety Razor™ ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Senior Editor; Jonathan Downie, Contributing Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Mark Mandel; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Emily Davis, Vincent Fish, Deak Kirkham, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Samuel Andersson, Florian Breit, Chris Brew, Bethany Carlson, Tuuli Mustasydän, Mary Shapiro; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Suppositio Confusa Tantum for Almost Everyone!; December 2018 ... [ more ]

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