SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

— 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 ]

Top Tips For Linguists— Part II. The SpecGram Editorial Board. Realizing that many linguists, young and old, find themselves unsure of how best to succeed (or have success thrust upon them), we of the Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board have assembled a collection of high-impact protips that will help any linguist achieve their full potential—and then some! Continued from Part I... You can represent some of the patterns simply all of the time, or all of the patterns simply some of the time, but you can’t represent all of the patterns simply all of the time. Control definitions, and you control the means of model-production. The smart way to keep linguists ... [ 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 ]

BABEL. ... The Journal of the Worldwide Linguistic Society, BOARD OF EDITORS, David Dwyer, Douglas S. Files, Eugene Gagliano, C.F. Hockett, David Kathman, James McCawley, David G. Lockwood, C.F. Meyer, Carol Miller, Barbara Paskay, Lynn Poulton, Fu Qiying, Don Reindl, Keith Slater, William C. Spruiell, Chandrashekhar Veera, Insun Yang, Jian-nan Zhang, ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

What is Linguistics Good For, Anyway?. An Advice Column by Jonathan “Crazy Ivan” van der Meer. The most commonly asked question of a linguist, when one’s secret is revealed, is (all together now!): “How many languages do you speak?” I’ve decided that a good answer to this question is π. More than three, less than four—though if you discover that your interlocutor is singularly unsophisticated or otherwise from Kansas, you can call it three to keep things simple. A less commonly asked, but almost certainly as frequently considered questions is, “So, what is linguistics good for, anyway?” That one is harder to answer—at least if you ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Old Professor Hockett. Old Professor Hockett came to our school one day, To teach us some linguistics and earn a little pay. More accurately, history was what he taught us all, In 1989, as the leaves began to fall; And all us graduate students, when the clock struck one, We’d gather in the classroom and have the mostest fun, A-listening to the stories that Hockett told about, And the Chomskyans that gets you, If you, Don’t, Watch, Out! Once there was a linguist wasn’t biunique, So when he went out to the field, he was up the creek. His colleagues heard him holler, his informants heard him bawl, And when they tried to find him, he wasn’t there at all!, And they looked at his phonology and found it was a ... [ more ]

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part E—Phonetics vs. Phonology. Hilário Parenchyma, C.Phil. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. We will skip the introduction, as we have been there, done that. Once more into the breach! For this installment in our series on Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, we will turn our attention to Phonetics and Phonology and the difference between the two: Phonetics:, ... Phonology:, ... Thanks to Professor Phlogiston, of the Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn, for the opportunity of a lifetime, as a student, to, on this occasion, share with so many of my fellow linguisticians my views, as illustrated above, concerning matters, which are of such immeasurable import ... [ more ]

The Original Language of Winnie-the-Pooh. Aureliano Buendía, Universidad de Macondo. The text known in English as Winnie-the-Pooh occurs in dozens of different languages. Scholars have long debated the question of what was the original language of composition. One of the most popular hypotheses has been that the original text was written in English. The present paper will use textual evidence to demonstrate the impossibility of that hypothesis and to suggest a more likely candidate. Consider the following lines from the beginning of Chapter I in the English-language version. (1) ...here he is...ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh. When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

Numeri++. Praenomen Gentilicium Cognomen, Esq.. It would be a great leap forward in humanities-nerd–science-nerd relations if we could convince the STEMmier nerds that linguistics is at least kinda interesting. Of course, linguistics really is interesting, but we have to rope them in first; baby steps are needed before we go full-tilt “minimally transmogrificational principals and parametric aleph movement Chornskyan hegemony” on them. We need to ease them in with simpler things—fun stuff like auto-antonyms, and useful stuff like what distinguishes en dashes and em dashes, or how to properly use a semicolon. It seems fair to expect our partially ... [ more ]

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