SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

The Perplexed Linguist’s Guide to English Departments. Now with Footnotes! Athanasious Schadenpoodle. So, Dear Reader, you have completed your Ph.D. in Linguistics (yay you!), run headlong into the grim realities of the modern job market (poor you!), broadened your ideas about possible teaching contexts (smart you!) and landed a gig in an English department (lucky you?). You’ve potentially got the base of the Maslovian pyramid covered for at least a semester, but you’re in a rather alien environment, surrounded by people who talk funny in a way that Dialectology 501 never prepared you for and who have some markedly odd folkways. Some culture shock is inevitable, but a little knowledge can go a long ... [ 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 ]

Shigudo, Reluctantly. Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton. In 1963, at the tender age of 24, I found myself on an expedition deep in the Amazon Basin, up a smallish tributary of the Río Ucayali. There we encountered a well-established tribe of indigenous people, numbering close to 400 and living in relative isolation, who called themselves the Shigudo. Several members of the tribe spoke nearly fluent Spanish,¹ and we were able to communicate quite effectively with them. As our expedition was chiefly anthropological in nature, and the Shigudo were, anthropologically ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

Improving L2 Performance with Pirahã Shigudo_, and Simple English. The effects of syntactic and semantic priming on successful L2 communication. Jeannot Van Tricasse, Jules Verne University, Paris, France. As is well known, students of foreign languages are often frustrated by their lack of ability to express thoughts of normal complexity in the language they are studying.^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10} This frustration can easily turn into a bitterness that leaves the student unable or unwilling to continue their language studies, even after a year or more of study.^{11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20} This is an unfortunate state of affairs for many reasons. Bilingualism has been implicated in ... [ more ]

On the Proto-Indo-European Origin of ‘Twerk’. Mark Butcher & Mark Candlestick-Maker, Department of PIE Studies, Pecan University. A common question asked of linguists these days, to our collective dismay, is “What is the etymology of ‘twerk’?”¹ Twerking is a dance craze with respectable origins in the New Orleans bounce music scene,² but it has enraged millions in recent years for reasons we would rather avoid writing about. Several authors have speculated that the term is a clipping of ‘footwork’ or a portmanteau of ‘twist’ and ‘jerk’³ (foolish speculation, we know). We will make the case that the word is of ... [ more ]

Оrthоgraрhіc Perрlехer. The Speculative Grammarian Оrthοɡrаphіс Ρerplехеr is a not-quite-pointless little tool that 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 digital 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 ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXXIII, Number 3 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Senior Editor; Jonathan Downie, Contributing Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Mark Mandel; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Emily Davis, Vincent Fish, Deak Kirkham, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Samuel Andersson, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Tel Monks, James Pasto, Mary Shapiro; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; In Search of the Mother of All Dad Jokes; January 2019 ... [ more ]

Orthographically-Conditioned Morphology. CJ Quines. Motivation. The other day¹ I received through personal correspondence² the following note: “BTW, we have a fairly extensive PR from someone to i18nize something.” From my extensive experience with sociolinguistics,³ I instantly understood some of the abbreviations used in this sentence, such as BTW meaning By The Way, or PR meaning Pull Request, something we trust the computational linguists in the audience are intimately familiar with. But the interesting piece of data here is “i18nize”. The numeronym⁴ stands for internationalization, with the number 18 as there are 18 ... [ more ]

A New Study of Linguistic Synesthesia. by Ott Harfondle, Independent Scholar¹. Synesthesia is a peculiar psychological phenomenon in which one sensory stimulus causes a response of a different sense. A prototypical example of synesthesia is sensing color when hearing certain tones. Thus, the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff recalled an occasion when he and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff encountered Alexander Scriabin, who associated colors with musical keys. To Rachmaninoff’s surprise, Rimsky-Korsakoff agreed with Scriabin in general, though they disagreed on several of the associations. The two agreed on the key of D major as yellow, but when Rachmaninoff expressed his disbelief, Rimsky-Korsakoff ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLV, Number 3; December 2008, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLV, No 3, CONSULTING EDITORS, Ken Miner, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: James Crippen, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jouni Maho, Carin Marais, Daniela Müller, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kean Kaufmann, Joey Whitford, e =, lim, n→∞ (1 +, 1, ... n, )ⁿ, K, ONKERINTOJ LAŬ, KONKERITOJ تیمور لنگ, Karolvs Magnvs, William the Bastard, Pôn Đu-me, Чингис Хаан, 데라우치 마사타케, Kakina, ... [ more ]

The Linguistic Big Crunch. M. Adam Block. In my role as Physologist at the High-Energy Pronoun Accelerator,¹ I have been charged with the complex task of determining the physical laws of language. Throughout my long and distinguished career these first three days on the job, I have come to a startling conclusion: the universe of language as we know it will ultimately and spectacularly conclude in a Linguistic Big Crunch. Previous studies in historical linguistics approached the study of language as if it were a biological organism.² By tracing the speciation of language descendants from their ancestors, linguists have conclusively proved and extensively mapped a number of ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT SpecGram Language Placement Services. As any sociolinguist can tell you, language vitality is all about status. And frankly, most languages don’t have it. Does yours?¹ Most languages haven’t even taken the basic step of hiring a part-time publicist. Nor can most attract a truly talented linguist (or an unscrupulously devious one) whose tireless publication efforts can usher them into international prominence. Fortunately, SpecGram is here to help. SpecGram Language Placement Services offers your language the fame it deserves, at a price for any budget. Available Packages. “Back from the Brink” Language Tune-Up. Script consultation ... [ more ]

Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, BOOKS, SERIES, and MORE The following valuable volumes, spectacular series, and interesting items have been released with pride by Psammeticus Press, an academic publishing house founded in honor of the first and purest of linguistic inquirers: one might criticize his methods, but who could quibble with his results? Follow the links below to learn more about these fabulous books and excellent series, each destined to become a classic in the field. Retractions, Rejections and Reconstructions: The Multiply Integrated Lives of Linguistics Texts by Speculative Grammarian Retextualization Editor Reid Rafft Published 2025. 2,328 pages When it comes to texts ... [ 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 ]

Reflections on the Dooms/Punod Manuscript. by Faoi Smacht, University of Khirokitia, Χοιροκοιτία. Arguably the third most-celebrated “mystery manuscript” behind only the Voynich manuscript and the Warren Commission Report, is the infamous Dooms/Punod Manuscript. This infamous snippet of text has been the downfall of many a young linguist, seeking the rewards that would certainly come from its decipherment—fame, fortune, renown to surpass that of even the most well-known constructors of artificial languages for television shows! The purpose of this paper is to summarize all that is known about the manuscript, and to ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, I found your reply to FS/Effie concerning the Doom/Punod manuscript to be patronizing, condescending, stilted, disfluent, and oddly formatted. That can mean only one thing: steganography! The first letter of each line spells out the words “the black copters”. When I re-formatted your reply in a fixed-width font, the rest of the message appeared in the 12th column: “are coming for you”: ... I hope Effie escaped unharmed. Sincerely, Ron H. Neely, (no relation) — Dear da-doo-Ron-Ron, As is well known by any well-informed practitioner of the delicate art of ... [ more ]

Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are They Ever!. by, April May June, Freshman in Elementary Education, Indiana University at Bloomington. It is — "Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — well-known from my L103 class that Turkish and Amharic supposedly aren't related, though it is no longer clear which languages they are related to. However, I have found lots of words in the two languages which sound alike and mean the same thing in only two months of hearing them spoken in two local restaurants. The similarities first caught my attention during an argument at the Turkish restaurant in which the owner kept saying "sought." ... [ more ]

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