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 ]

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 ]

Degenerative Grammar, Our Current State of Linguistic Degradation. D. T. R. O’Rait, D. Bauch, and Wayne N. DeKay, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. “I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.” —Henry Miller Since the 1950s, linguistics has been wild with excitement over Chomsky’s insights, collectively known as “generative grammar.” As all non-linguists know, however, grammar as speakers encounter it in daily life is actually degenerative. In fact, years of mathematical modeling following the Minimalist Program have shown that the set of all possible well-formed sentences, ... [ 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 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 ]

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 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 ]

I U Linguistics Club. Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. June 1978. ... i u linguistics club, edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... [ 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 ]

Virtual NLP Dice. The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen. ... [Re-roll.] [Re-roll like you mean it !!] As many successful practitioners of Natural Language Processing know, the surest path to success is to come up with some complicated-looking equation and then rest on your mathematical laurels for the rest of your career—because “Math is hard, and hard things are for smart people, and smart people are just better. QED.” Or so we learned from the original ad for NLP Dice: “Local Linguist Mom Discovers One Weird Trick for Deriving NLP Equations!—Computational Linguists Hate Her!” (SpecGram ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXI, Number 4 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Bill Spruiell, Senior Editor, Sheri Wells-Jensen, Consulting Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Florian Breit; Editorial Associates: Cem Bozsahin, Bethany Carlson, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks, Callum Robson, Laura Ryals, Yuval Wigderson; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; The only good Indo-European language is a dead Indo-European language; December 2014 ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian. Volume CXLVIII, Number 4. March 1998. Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXLVIII, No 4 EDITOR, Tim Pulju ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Aya Katz, John Newell, Keith Slater, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Dave Fleck, Victor T. Jones III, Donald Francis Reindl, Sérgio Meira de Santa Cruz Oliveira, I don't reckon you will find anything on Judge Irwin, ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXVIII, Number π ... Speculative Grammarian, in association with, Psammeticus Press, is proud to present a special, supplemental duograph, Pseudo-Psiblings, by Trey Jones, &, On Pseudo-Psiblings, by Fillastre Pèl-Roig, et al. Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief, Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Pseudo-Psiblings; Mid-April 2016 ... [ more ]

HanjieLinguru III. ... Key phrase: подвод воздуха для охлаждения реактивного конуса, Б = # of в (in the key phrase), Д = # of o, Ж = # of ж, И = # of д, Л = # of я, Ц = # of к, Ъ = # of а, Я = # of г, з, п, р, с, and т, Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Tokyo. After having been AWOL for several months (we finally located them on a beach in Biarritz), the SpecGram Puzzle Elves™ are back with their noses shackled to the grindstone for another installment of HanjieLinguru. HanjieLinguru is a simple extension of the traditional Hanjie form, but with just enough linguistics ... [ more ]

Out on Parole. Publishing Notices and General Ravings from the Editor. ... mit Rob Norris, Esq. Langue du Monde has shifted paradigms, as lesser men might put it, and more-or-less faxed its entire production process to the chilly, immer foggy, groovy, bitchin’ heinous, and above all extraordinarily rich community of Santa Barbara, California. Well, actually we’re located in the somewhat less affluent sub-community of Isla Vista, a student-officiated war zone adjacent to the beach and UCSB, but for political reasons we will claim Santa Barbara as our occidental headquarters. Although LdM was purchased for $1,000,000 late last spring in a fit of Panic and Vision (thus the change of ... [ more ]

Quotes: What People are Saying. Here are a few of our favorite things people have said about Speculative Grammarian over the years, collected wild on the internet, or domesticated in email — Q1117. C’est sans doute un humour un peu ésotérique mais bon —Sémioticien du bisou — Q1116. Support the addition of the double-dot wide O to the IPA chart by buying some Speculative Grammarian merchandise! No, I’m not being sponsored or getting a commission from them. I just appreciate good geeky humour —Grace Teng — Q1115. Speculative Grammarian ist die erste Zeitschrift für satirische Linguistik. Kostenlos zugänglich, ein ... [ 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 ]

Against Hermogenes. Anders Horn. The traditional account of the relationship between phonetics and meaning holds that there is a “duality of patterning” (Bloomfield 1933). Phonemes are individually meaningless and are separated by an iron wall from morphemes—the smallest unit of meaning. However already by the 50s cracks were beginning to show in the account (Bolinger 1949). Phenomena like “sound symbolism” could not be placed on either side of the divide. Even old-fashion sound changes, once the key proof of the arbitrariness of the relation, were found to be conditioned by meaning. For example in many English dialects [ŋ] has changed to [n] in the morpheme ing but ... [ more ]

SpecGram Dictionary of the Linguistics of Mythological Beasts . It’s Not Just Legendary; It’s Unreal . Volume 87: The Werewolf, by Val Kiri¹ (with the assistance of Dec, Shaun, and Harry). While books about syntax have their place,² we all know that language is basically just words. Hence dictionaries. Now these come in many shapes and sizes, although most are three-dimensional and usually cuboid. Geometrical universals aside, though, many dictionaries are actually pretty useless; we all know what most words mean after all! For example, I’ve used quite a few words in this intro already and I’ve only had to look up two!³ While the inutility of ... [ 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 ]

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