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 ]

A Love/Hate Relationship: Pesky Antonyms. Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University. When students get to college, the majority of them have never thought about antonyms as being anything more than “opposites.” So big is the opposite of small, just like buyer is the opposite of seller. Then, all of a sudden, students are forced into a linguistics course with a professor who tells them that they have to learn to differentiate among different types of antonyms. Student’s minds are nearly exploding with information as they have to learn definitions of terms like ‘converse’ and ‘gradable’ and ‘complementary’ in the world of ... [ more ]

Lost Media: Linguistics Rock!. The SpecGram Media Elves™. In 1974, following the success of Schoolhouse Rock!, the independent production company Lingo Lango Longo released Linguistics Rock!, a linguistics-themed animated musical educational program similar in style to Schoolhouse Rock!. Unfortunately, the style, the branding, the episode titles, the characters, and the music were all very similar to Schoolhouse Rock!—so much so that Lingo Lango Longo’s Leado Lawyero, Leo Lombardo—in a stunning act of moral courage—pulled the plug on the whole enterprise before Lingo Lango Longo could be sued into oblivion. All that ... [ more ]

Pseudo-Psiblings™ And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families. A proposal for improving and clarifying family nomenclature for the 21st century. by Trey Jones. Introduction. Language evolves—otherwise we’d all be able to read Beowulf in the original, right? Sometimes language changes in response to cultural changes. But sometimes it doesn’t change fast enough to keep up with cultural changes. This paper seeks to give English a little push in a much-needed direction. There has been a fairly radical change in Western society in the last hundred years or so. It used to be that if a woman was on her fourth husband, one automatically felt a little sorry for ... [ 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 ]

Is Translation Possible? The Answer Rhymes with Noh; by Trent Slater; From Volume CLVIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; February 2010. — While translation studies continues to grow as a field, with benefits being felt not only in applied linguistics but also in the world-at-large, one obvious fact continues to be overlooked. Scholars who pore over the results of the process called “translation” omit to tell their readers of the theoretical questioning of the very object of their study. Put another way, while everyone is busy examining “translations,” no one bothers to ask whether translation is actually possible. (Read by Trey Jones.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

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 ]

Spaghetti or Lasagna for Linguists. LSA Committee on Comestibles in Linguistics. In order to understand various types of linguists better, we conducted a controlled experiment. Very simply, we asked each linguist “Do you want spaghetti or lasagna for dinner?” We think the replies we got are instructive, and so we are sharing them with you. Classical Generative Phonologist: “Whether it’s spaghetti or lasagna will be predictable from context. Give me either one, and call it ‘pasta.’ ” Structuralist: “Both. Neither one will have any flavor unless I can compare them.” Typologist: “Spaghetti. It’s a more prototypical instance of the ... [ more ]

A Brief History of Linguistics and of the World’s Languages. As told by Prof. Harold Twistenbaum. The first human words appear to be wh-words, which explains the fixation in modern linguistics over these species. Puzzled by Adam’s First Wink and funny head gestures, Eve begets language with wha’?, soon to be accompanied by the locative counterpart. Who, serving no purpose at the time, had been spared the abuse. The split of the Mother Tongue happened the very first day when Eve decided not to stoop to Adam’s level. The emerging Father Tongue died out, its words being homophonous and homosemous with onomatopoeics. The First Great Leap Forward came when Eve accidentally invented ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

The SpecGram Quiz to End All Quizzes. ... Everyone makes Internet quizzes—even your three richest widowed aunts use their mite, if not their might, to bedazzle the gullible and amass those sweet, sweet clicks. So stand aside, ladies, SpecGram is on the ~~make~~ move! There’s a new quiz powerhouse in town, and since we don’t believe in planned obsolescence, you’ll never need nor want another!, Just answer these 17 handy-dandy mutually orthogonal questions to get the answers to all (or at least the 7 most important) of your burning questions. ... [ more ]

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part 3—Morphological Typology. Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. No need for an introduction, it was covered in previous installments (on non-configurational languages and ergativity). Instead, let us proceed to the next chapter of our Cartoon Theories of Linguistics. I have provided the following cartoonish exegesis of morphological typology for your edification: ... Up next: Statistical Machine Translation. References, Baker, Mark. (1988). Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing. Baker, Mark. (1996). The polysynthesis parameter. Comrie, Bernard. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology (2nd ... [ more ]

The Nutritional Value of Phonemes. D. I. E. Titian & Vic Tuals. Research from beyond SpecGram has found some surprising associations between phoneme inventory size, population size, and distance from the likely East African origin of our species (Atkinson 2011). Larger populations tend to speak languages with more phonemes, and phoneme inventory size decreases with distance from East Africa. Subsequent work has confirmed these associations with larger datasets (Daland 2015). Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to the most likely explanation of the data, which was given in a SpecGram podcast several years ago (Language Made Difficult, Vol. 5): phonemes have mass, and in order to survive the long ... [ more ]

On the Go ~ Went Alternation. A Contribution (?) to the Generative Phonology of English^*. Bernard Comrie, University of Cambridge. Most theories of phonology (morphophonology, morphology) allow for suppletion, whereby the allomorphs of a morpheme are completely unrelated phonetically. In discussing English phonology, one example of suppletion that is frequently cited is go [gōw] ~ went [went]. Within generative phonology (taken here essentially in the sense of Chomsky & Halle (1968)), one attempts to set up a single underlying representation for all allomorphs of a morpheme. The fact (if it is a fact) that suppletion exists, i.e. that certain allomorphs of a single morpheme ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXVIII, Number 2 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Bill Spruiell, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Adam Baker, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Robin Day, Siva Kalyan, Kean Kaufmann, Andrew Lamont, Carin Marais, Tel Monks, Mary Shapiro, Adham Smart, Kien-Wei Tseng, Don Unger; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Improved Razzle (Similar Dazzle); February 2017 ... [ more ]

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Voice Systems: A Functional Analysis, by Carrie Cameron. 170 pages. Houston, Texas, USA: Rice University Press, 1990.. This well-written volume takes as its goal the attempt “to reconcile and integrate the diverse phenomena that have been taken under the heading of voice” more specifically it focusses “on certain voice phenomena that have been considered marginal or ignored altogether, in order to contribute some fresh ideas to an old problem.” A laudable goal, this, and indeed Cameron does an excellent job in the main. Her overall framework and conclusions seem quite reasonable, and I recommend her work highly to anyone interested in this topic. Since I could ... [ more ]

Warehouse Moving Sale. We’ve lost the lease on our warehouse and anything we can’t sell we have to move—or rent interns from Speculative Grammarian to do it—and that’s expensive! Help us out and buy a book—or twelve! 15% discount on orders over $387.49! Footnoten: Traversal Strategies in Recursive Footnote Numbering Schemes. F. Ußnote. 2003. 463pp. “Explores depth-first vs breadth-first traversal strategies while decrying hierarchical sub-notes as an ‘academic aberration’.” Price: $2. Punctuated Novelty Historical Trends in—and the Trendy History of—Novel Punctuation ... [ more ]

LingDoku II— The Revival. by Tangent Wong, and the SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. For your puzzling pleasure, we’ve revived the LingDoku II puzzle form after several years of hibernation. Thanks to Tangent Wong for contributing the new puzzle. LingDoku, in general, is a shameless attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Japanese number/logic game SuDoku by concocting a SuDoku-like activity suitable for Linguists and introducing a thin veneer of linguistics to create an artificial barrier to participation for non-linguists. ... LingDoku II symbol inventory, The puzzle uses 16 phonetic symbols, shown here. Each symbol occurs exactly once in the solution, and no row or column may ... [ more ]

Linguistic Influences In Recent Research On Music. James D. McCawley, University of Chicago. (read at the University of Chicago Linguistics Department’s 1975 celebration of Godspeed Day) In recent years an increasing number of musical scholars have come to the conclusion that musical analysis has no solid theoretical foundation, that the reality of the units and relationships in terms of which analyses are formulated has been subject to at best scanty experimental verification, and that in many cases it is not even clear what sort of reality these units and relationships are supposed to have. Is a cadence an acoustic phenomenon? a perceptual phenomenon? is it merely a convenient fiction that one employs in specifying ... [ more ]

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