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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 three bigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of bigrams with which to fill it up. Using each bigram 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 15, 2019, and you could win a prize. Solutions and winners ... [ more ]

The Ballad of Three-Tongued Ted. Onfor Anwyth. Dedicated to Frank Harrington, Graham Turner, Deborah Cameron, Elizabeth Frazer, Penelope Harvey, M. B. H. Rampton, and Kay Richardson In the fields beyond Slough, past the sheep and the cows, There are men who enjoy the narration Of a young man called Ted, “a legend” they said For feats of co-articulation. Whether plosive or stop, he’d say four in one pop, Even dentals and velars were conquered. And the affricates too, though the trills made him blue. After /Ꙫʙ͡tk/, his mum thought he was bonkers!, What made him so honed in simultaneous phones? The answer’s the core of this fable. By an odd quirk of genes, and strange ... [ 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 ]

Texan for Linguists. Katy Jo Parker, and, Truman ‘Tex’ Beauregard. This article is not about the descriptively interesting linguistic features of Texan dialects of English (such as incipient fixin’ singular they, modal stacking, second person plural y’all, ain’t and cain’t, bidness, coke for soda, etc.) nor is it about any of the interesting Spanish-related linguistic phenomena in Texas (such as “Spanglish” Chicano and Tejano English, code-switching, or Pachuco slang). Rather, this article is about the colorful language and evocative phrasing that makes Texan English a much-talked-about dialect, even (and especially) ... [ 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 ]

HitoriGuistiku II, Now in an alphabet you don’t already know Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Tokyo. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™ are pleased to present for your puzzle-solving pleasure another HitoriGuistiku—a linguistics-heavy variant of the well-known Japanese logic puzzle Hitori. Rules. The HitoriGuistiku puzzle is presented on a grid, with each cell containing a character. The goal is to “paint” appropriate cells black so that no row or column contains more than one character with a given phonetic feature. For this Cherokee-based HitoriGuistiku, at right, the relevant features are initial consonant or cluster and ... [ 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 ]

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