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— 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 ]

The Sociolinguistic Impact of Hippie Linguist Naming Practices. ɹɒbɪn O’Jonesson. There is little discussion in the literature concerning the social and psychological effects of the distinctive and unusual names given to children by their hippie parents, such as Moonbeam, Peacekarma, Ryvre, Starchild, Redpony, and so many more. Even less attention has been paid to the naming practices of the particular sub-culture of hippie linguists, who advocated for free morphemes in the 60’s and gave their children names such as Monophthongbreathstream, Pronouncopula, Rezonator, Asteriskchild, Redponymy, and Noam. ... The family VW van in 1971. Very few people so-named have kept their monikers into ... [ more ]

IPA-to-ILPS Transcriber. by Daniel Swanson. Type International Phonetic Alphabet^* into the input box and get the corresponding Inter-Lingual Personal Script below. Or, handcraft individual consonants and vowels. See “Inter-Lingual Personal Script” (SpecGram CLXXXIX.2) for more information. Scale, Add IPA string Add Consonant Add Vowel — ^* Suprasegmentals and tones are not currently implemented. Some other parts of the IPA may also not be supported. ... [ more ]

EtymGeo™—Weird Little U.S. Towns, Part IV. by The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Below are clues to the names of a number of cities. The name of each city is a homograph of an English word. The clues provided are vaguely etymological, and probably not sufficiently helpful. All your knowledge of geography will probably not be enough to provide any assistance. Alas. These towns, as with the previous bunches, are all purportedly in the United States, though that may not be true. If true, you still probably haven’t heard of any of them, unless you grew up in one of them, in which case you have our sympathies. ???, Montana From the first person singular perfect active indicative of Ancient Greek ... [ more ]

Startling Allegations Rock Historical Linguistics Community. by Andrew Lamont. BLOOMINGTON, Indiana—It has been an exciting week for the Indo-Europeanist community. While Monday saw the announcement of Bob’s Law, which derives the modern English Pez dispenser from the Proto-Indo-European *pesd-, today’s news marks a more controversial chapter. ... Scholars point to sloppy forgeries like this tablet as proof of Grimm’s misconduct. Recently uncovered documents suggest Jacob Grimm may have forged evidence to support some of his theories. “We now suspect that the entire Tocharian branch may have been invented by Grimm to further his career and possibly ... [ more ]

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor. Once again our long-time colleague and comrade/editor-in-arms Mikael Thompson has provided some high-quality summer reading material (and in this case a novel’s worth of quantity, to boot) for the discriminating fan of linguistic themed fiction. Strangecraft is a slow-burning weird tale, a detailed, personal story told against a stygian, cosmic-scale backdrop. The narrator wends his way through the wilds of post-Subsidence New England in search of an advanced degree in linguistics, but both he and the reader find considerably more than they bargained for in and around the environs of the Miskatonic Institute of Technology, as numerous ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Hello World!. A Letter from the Managing Editor. Despite our myriad modern problems, computers have become an indispensable part of our lives, and we should embrace and celebrate that fact. At SpecGram we naturally wanted to do so in a linguistically geeky way—thus, we present to you this Computer Language Appreciation Issue. A common complaint from those of us living fully in the Information Age is so-called “unsolicited commercial email” or, as it is more commonly known, spam. I doubt that I will find a need to refinance any of my seven mortgages (don’t ask), purchase grey-market prescription drugs, or register for a “high-throughput poodle-waxing” ... [ 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 ]

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 CXLVIII, Number 3. February 1998. Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXLVIII, No 3 EDITOR, Tim Pulju ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Dave Fleck, Trey Jones, Aya Katz, Sérgio Meira, Don Reindl, Keith Slater, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATE, Mikael A. Thompson, Na₂Cr₂O₇·H₂O, ... [ more ]

Monoglot Derivatives. Polly and Paul E. Glōttidēs, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. As new varieties of multilingualism continue to arise, simplistic terms such as polyglot and hyperglot cannot be expected to represent the full diversity of human linguistic competence. Unfortunately, English vocabulary (unlike Eskimo vocabulary), hasn’t even made a pretense of keeping up. Each and every day a new form of super-duper-multilingualism arises, and yet English-speaking linguists have just the one term to describe it. As a public service, we at SpecGram are pleased to offer a small sampling of terms, which may serve to describe some of ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Computer Language Appreciation Issue Volume CLI, Number 2; April 2006, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLI, No 2, Bold New Tagline, (Same Great Content), MANAGING EDITOR, Trey Jones, EDITOR EMERITUS, Tim Pulju, SENIOR EDITOR, Keith Slater, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Bryan Allen, Adam Baker, Candace Cardinal, Teal Doggett, Daniel Currie Hall, Martin Hilpert, Damon Lord, Steven Lulich, Kean Kaufmann, Sheila McCann, Ken Miner, Michael Niv, Jamin Pelkey, Mikael Thompson, Nathan, Sanders, Bill Spruiell, Adam, Ussishkin, Rita Watson, Joey Whitford, ... [ more ]

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