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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Decoupling the Linguolabial Trill From Its Ideobatian Association. Eunice Emigre, Professor of Maquillage in Linguistics, The Δίς Λεγόμενον Centre for Endeepened Ideation. When I first came across the Gricean associations of the otherwise respectable linguolabial trill, I immediately informed a make-up artiste I knew who had unfortunately drawn her eyebrows too high that morning. She looked surprised. Artificial pigmentation aside, it is clear that viewing the noble linguolabial trill as a mere breach of the Gricean maxim of manner is a disservice to linguistics. The uniqueness of this trill is, of course, that it unites two large, consciously movable ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 New Basic Word Order: VOV. Arnold P. Fasnacht. Department of Linguistics, School of Agriculture and Drama, University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, Hoople, North Dakota 61637. Recent years have seen a steady increase in the number of attested basic word order types. Greenberg (1963) originally recognized only three types, VSO, SVO, and SOV. Pullum (1977) added VOS to the list, but proposed that no others were possible. Derbyshire (1977) confirmed the existence of OVS, and recent reports (SIL Grapevine 1978) have indicated that OSV must also be recognized. These findings have caused a certain flurry of excitement among theoretical linguists. Reactions to the discoveries may be broadly divided into two classes, ... [ more ]

It’s a Doʊɡ -Eat-Doge World. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. If you don’t know who or what Doge is,¹ you are in good company—old, uncool, out-of-touch company, but good company nonetheless.² But even those who are too cool for school⁹ may not know of Doʊɡ. Doʊɡ is very different from the better-known¹⁶ Doge. ... The organisers of the “Writing Research Across Borders III” Conference, for their Symposium “Researching to Write, Writing to do Research: Writing research in researchers training in ... [ 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 ]

The Biological Basis Of Universal Grammar. by Maiya Sershen, Science Editor to the Houston Hitchin' Post (Cambridge, MA)--The strongest support yet for Chomsky's universal grammar--his proposal that human beings are genetically endowed with an autonomous syntax module--has come in the discovery of large protein molecules in neural cells which almost precisely mimic the binary-branched tree structures already familiar to linguists worldwide. The discovery also opens up the possibility of, ... A TREE STRUCTURE FOR A BASIC TRANSITIVE SENTENCE, biochemically altering people's speech behavior--a specter which has some scientists questioning further research until ethical guidelines can be established for the new field. The first ... [ 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 ]

Linguistics Manifesto. by Ling M. Anifesto. Introduction to Linguistics Manifesto. There have been many linguistic manifestos over the course of the many centuries since man uttered his first schwa. But never, in the entire history of the universe, according to my private research, has there ever been a linguistics manifesto—that is, a manifesto on linguistics itself. In this linguistics manifesto, I shall endeavor to reveal the hidden mysteries of linguistics in the style of a traditional manifesto. While I do not intend for this linguistics manifesto to be the be-all and end-all of manifestos, I do intend for it to be the definitive work in the specialized area of linguistics manifestos. As it ... [ more ]

Izzy as Pie. by Dạ̃bḃlÿ Dũṫch S̊. X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. I recently stumbled across yet another spelling reform proposal, called PIE, or “Phonetically Intuitive English”. At first glance it looks like some English text got drunk in a Vietnamese print shop, and woke up the next day with some not very well thought out tattoos and piercings. I mean, let’s face it, the last thing English needs is diarrheal diacritics. You know, hemorrhaging jots and tittles is probably okay for languages that don’t need them for punctuation, but we’ve got standards over here. My conclusion is that if this is intuitive, or ... [ more ]

Linguistics: The Ultimate Field of Study?. Unintentionally, I have come upon evidence suggesting that linguistics is, perhaps, the ultimate field of study. By this I mean that there is a universal trend for highly motivated, hard working people, who tire easily of lesser subjects, to progress along a hierarchy of disciplines, culminating with linguistics. The evidence consists of a number of case studies, presented below. The names have been changed to protect the identity of these academics, many of who may want to hide their past intellectual follies. J. Audzis: undergrad degree in chemical engineering, later received degree in Spanish literature; MA in linguistics; is currently pursuing a PhD in linguistics. O. Btillar: undergrad ... [ more ]

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