SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXIX, Number 3 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief Keith Slater, Executive Editor, Associate Editors, Pete Bleackley Jonathan Downie Mikael Thompson, Assistant Editors, Virginia Bouchard Mark Mandel Yuval Wigderson, Editorial Associates, Florian Breit Bethany Carlson Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Anita G. Gorman Tel Monks Bill Spruiell Sheri Wells-Jensen, Joey Whitford, Comptroller General Warning: This Product May Contain Deixis August 2017 ... [ more ]

From the Archives!—SpecGram Propaganda XII. The SpecGram Archive Elves™. A recent expedition into the SpecGram archives turned up 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. This twelfth batch of posters from that collection has been digitized and presented here for you, dear reader, to enjoy, retrospect on, and share. The full collection, which will continue to grow, is available from the SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda in an easily browsable and sharable format. ... [ 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 ]

They Have a Word for That. By Anita G. Gorman. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we shall speak of words. Well, we are always speaking of words, since we are speaking in words. If you get my drift. It has come to my attention that certain words are important to certain cultures. Is it any accident, for example, that the word ombudsman comes from Sweden, a country that wants everyone to be equal and everything to be fair? Perhaps you do not know this word, since you are American and find Swedish equality and fairness to be a bit boring. What is an ombudsman? Someone who investigates complaints and helps to bring about resolutions. In Sweden, and, I suppose, other countries with blond people, an ombudsman is often a ... [ more ]

The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature. Welcome to Online Selections from The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature, researched, compiled, and edited by the lexicographers, etymologists, and philologists of Speculative Grammarian. ... The editors of Speculative Grammarian are delighted to present selections of the fifty-volume lexicographic opus, The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature, online for the first time ever. The Compleat Encyclopaedia is a one-of-a-kind resource, ... [ more ]

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part E—Phonetics vs. Phonology. Hilário Parenchyma, C.Phil. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. We will skip the introduction, as we have been there, done that. Once more into the breach! For this installment in our series on Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, we will turn our attention to Phonetics and Phonology and the difference between the two: Phonetics:, ... Phonology:, ... Thanks to Professor Phlogiston, of the Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn, for the opportunity of a lifetime, as a student, to, on this occasion, share with so many of my fellow linguisticians my views, as illustrated above, concerning matters, which are of such immeasurable import ... [ more ]

Linguimericks, Book ९. A Neogrammarian wit Sought fun on the side with a flit. Through striving to nurture Conditional merger, Divorce was a second’ry split —Hester Fester-Münsterfenster, There once was a linguist emeritus, In retirement obsessed with Herodotus, With no fortune amassed From his scholarly past, He subsisted on beans and saleratus —Morris Swadesh III, There once was a mad syntactician, Like Plato an academician. Eschewing phonology, He mastered dendrology— What’s real’s form, the rest apparition —Pumptilian Perniquity, A lovelorn young student most frantic Screamed out in his best Esperantic, “Caj woh elj maj fuj Y con sluj mi vol tuj!” Now ... [ more ]

Whinge. by Zarfu. I saw the dullest minds of my generation destroyed by nonsense, nonce-rhymed limericks wretched, dragging their feet through amphibrachs and looking through thesauruses, scraggly-bearded hipsters burning through the midnight oil for the proper weighting of connections in the machinery of brain, whom poverty of stimulus inspired to heights of folly in the sempiternal darkness of the Charles River flowing across the tops of cement-booted cognitivists, who battered their brains to pulp against the Gnome and saw glossematic Danes staggering drunk in tagmemic non-illumination, who passed through universities with radiantly crazed eyes hallucinating assignations and light operettas among the ... [ more ]

Psammeticus Institute, Psammeticus Institute proudly presents... Dialect Continuum Language Studies, Psammeticus Institute—the Language Education branch of linguistics publishing powerhouse Psammeticus Press—allows you to harness the amazing transformative power of dialect continua in your own personal language learning. By attending a Dialect Continuum Language Studies course, you can slowly but surely transform the language you speak into the language you want to speak. In order to transform the language you speak into the language you want to speak, we at Psammeticus Institute set up for you a large number of literally parallel classrooms. In the first classroom, you, your ... [ 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 ]

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, but no, seriously, we’ve published a large collection of SpecGram articles, along with just enough new material to force obsessive collectors and fans to buy it, regardless of the cost. From the Introduction: The past twenty-five years have witnessed many changes in linguistics, with major developments in linguistic theory, significant expansion in language description, and even ... [ more ]

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