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 ]

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 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 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 ]

Previous Puzzle Solutions. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Here is the solution to Rasmus Rask Puzzle XV from the last issue. These brilliant puzzle-solvers have also achieved everlasting glory: Aisha Choudhury • Arcadia Arcadopoulou • Vincent Fish — The solutions to last issue’s Phonetic Drop Quote II is: /bikʌz ɛvɹiwʌn juzɪz læŋgwɪd͡ʒ tu tɔk ɛvɹiwʌn θɪŋks ðeɪ kæn tɔk əbaʊt læŋgwɪd͡ʒ/ (“Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language..”). These brilliant ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCV, Number 2 Penultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham, Vincent Fish; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Luca Dinu; Associate Editors: Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Emily Davis, Gabriel Lanyi, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; All the Noise That’s Fit to Print; November 2025, ... [ more ]

Why Linguistics is Not a Science. The SpecGram Editorial Board. In a couple of recent editorials we have answered several of the questions most frequently submitted by SpecGram readers. Since the publication of those editorials, by far the most common question received in our offices has been, “Could please furnish us with your bank account number so we can transfer payment to you?” We cannot in good conscience accede to this request, as it violates a number of constraints and therefore suffers from what we like to call “fatal infelicity.” Another frequent question, though, is more worthy of our attention, (though only due to its being fifth on the frequency list) and it is to that more ... [ more ]

Оrthоgraрhіc Perрlехer. Welcome to the Speculative Grammarian Оrthοɡrаphіс Ρerplехеr! This not-quite-pointless little tool will munge your text, randomly replacing some characters with homoglyphs that are nearly identical¹—or at least quite reasonably similar to the untrained eye. Why? To make text both very hard and very easy to find via normal search (try to find “οrthoɡrарhіс реrрleхer” on this page, for example); to confuse and amaze your friends and enemies alike;⁶ to pass the time in a ... [ more ]

Because You Can’t Do Everything You Want for Your Favorite Linguist—Get Them a Copy of The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics . Give the gift that says, “I don’t really know what you want, my dear linguist, but I’m trying!”—The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics. We all want to make our loved ones happy—but that isn’t always possible. With linguists, it can be particularly difficult, because—let’s face it—linguists are a difficult bunch: they talk funny, they ask silly questions, and they get excited about the most ridiculous things. “Ooo! ... [ more ]

Chickenese—A Grammatical Sketch. Damon Lord. Many linguists and animal psychologists have sought to discover if mankind is the sole species to have developed language. Recent experiments with chickens at Foxchester University, in Foxchester, England, have discovered that mankind is no longer alone. The language discovered has been dubbed Chickenese by linguists. All attempts to quantify grammar have failed; linguists believe Chickenese has little (if any) grammar. The current theory is that, due to the small size of the brain of the domesticated chicken and the limited vocabulary of the chicken species, thought processes are not developed enough to develop grammar, although repetition has been observed. ... [ more ]

The Hegemony of American Coffee and the Fight for Universal Tea. Prof. Dr. phil. Johannes Schomski, Faculty of Tea, Language and Philosophy, Munich Institute of Technology. Meine sehr geehrten Kollegen und Kolleginnen! While I have every appreciation for your concern with the defence of your frequently idiosyncratic but internationally sanctioned, if somewhat irrational, take on punctuation, it is cause for the utmost outrage that one of the otherwise so trustworthy and righteous Editors of one of the formerly most reputable scholarly outlets of our discipline should feel it appropriate to attack in one and the same breath with such a defence the hallmark of civilised society that is the distinctly human appreciation of tea. ... [ more ]

LingDoku III— Too Much, Too Late. Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Washington D.C.. For your puzzling pleasure, we’re introducing the LingDoku III puzzle form after several more years of hibernation. LingDoku, in general, is a shameless attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Japanese number/logic game SuDoku by concocting a SuDoku-like activity suitable for Linguists and introducing a thin veneer of linguistics to create an artificial barrier to participation for non-linguists. While interest in SuDoku has not completely disappeared, the mania of years gone by has certainly faded. And this puzzle is both harder (by virtue of its size) and more confusing (by virtue ... [ more ]

— http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress Welcome to the online home of Panini Press, an academic publishing house formerly dedicated to the proposition that Linguistics is the noblest of the academic fields, but now with a focus on Subjects of more relevance to the Working Linguist’s everyday life and career. ❦पा Important announcements from Panini Press: ❧ Word Problems for Linguists (November 2025): Linguists, we here at Panini Press know you thought that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill. However, the real world often has other plans, so, for your own good, Dr. Barbara Millicent Roberts’s new book, Word ... [ more ]

Dear Grammy, Un Koala If-Eyed. Now “Dear Grammy” gives her honest answers to the personal and perplexing linguistics questions that bother teenagers and baffle parents. Dear Grammy, My husband and I have noticed our teenage son Juulius has begun to vape and we believe it has consequently affected his linguistic capacity for speech. While it could merely be the natural phenomenon of age grading, we are worried that vaping is having adverse effects on his linguistic health. Nevertheless, the symptoms that our son exhibits are of the following: high-rising intonation, proclivity to insert the particle “like” in daily parlance, development of a penchant for wearing “totally chic and latest ... [ more ]

Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co. 1957. This slim volume, first published in 1957 and occasionally reprinted since then, has attracted surprisingly little attention in linguistic circles. It is unfortunate that this is the case, for in the book Chomsky proposes a truly innovative approach to syntactic problems which have plagued linguists since the days of Bloomfield. Essentially, Chomsky proposes that actual utterances should be understood as surface structures which have been derived from more basic deep structures by means of transformations. For instance, the sentence “Sir Egbert was devoured by the dragon” (my example, not ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT LinguaDate. Do all your conversations begin with references to journal papers? Is your social life decided by conference committees? Do you count watching adverts for exercise equipment as “seeing someone?” Then we have the service for you. With an algorithm created by qualified conlangers and a few drunk PhD students in computational linguistics, LinguaDate is guaranteed to match you with your ideal linguistics partner. Just listen to these testimonials: I was originally skeptical when LinguaDate matched me with Robin, who is a dyed-in-the-wool believer in Lexical Functional Grammar, while I’m a hard core Role and Reference Grammarian. I thought for sure LinguaDate’s ... [ more ]

Linguomogy. By Tiberius Bertrom, Ph.D. The Academy of Northwestern State University College and Technical Institute. In 1994, the morphologist Mark Aronoff introduced us to the concept of the morphome, which might be defined as follows: morphome (n.) a unit of linguistic representation known only to the morphologist The introduction of this theoretical construct by Aronoff can (and should) be seen as a challenge to the rest of our discipline. The explanatory power and necessity of the morphome to the linguistic subfield of morphology can no longer be questioned,¹ so as researchers, we are left with a series of interesting questions: What is the theoretical equivalent of the morphome in syntax? Semantics? ... [ more ]

Linguimericks, Book ३९. She’s been told he’s The Linguist Almighty. Just one class and with joy and delight she Believes all of Chomsky With nary a qualmsky! That’s the life of a frosh at MIT —α-Betty Abū Gida, The Brits are a curious race, Whose humor themselves does efface. But also well-known, And oft to bemoan: They tend other tongues to deface —Hester Fester-Münsterfenster, With my bag of linguistical tricks, You might think I’d have interesting schticks, But that Ph.D. robe Is just an empty node— All I can do is write linguimericks —Aspergillus Niger, I wish I’d ne’er taken the task Of writing a grammar of Basque. Each feature ... [ more ]

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