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 ]

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 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 ]

Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome . Are you looking for a book about ancient Roman history that’s interesting, informative, and amusing? No? Oh. Well, all the same, as long as you’re on this webpage already, we’d like to recommend that you buy Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome. Easy to read, full of genuine historical facts, and adorned with amateurish hand-drawn pictures, The History of Rome is so good that even Girolamo Savonarola might hesitate to cast it into the flames. And best of all, it’s only $6.99! Buy one now! Interested, but wary of being burned by a slick advertising campaign for a product that fails to live up to the hype? Then download the free preview and read ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

SpecGram, Quarterly. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. [Note: Due to a scheduling error⁰ and tight deadline, we were unable to cull a small percentage of the Editor-in-Chief’s extensive and extraneous footnotes. Our usual modus operandi is to allow him to annotate and divagate to his tiny black heart’s approximation of contentment, and then mercilessly cut the dead weight with a red pencil-cum-machete. In this case, we were only able to remove and repair the subsequent rhetorical and narrative damage for approximately 86.7% (by weight) of the Editor-in-Chief’s most egregious footnotery. We apologize for the unavoidable ... [ more ]

Teaching Undergraduates Without Slander. A. Nonymous & B. Nonymous, Not Your Department, Some Other University. The central trait of any credentialed linguist is perhaps the unshakeable belief that oneself and one’s intellectual cronies are thick in the pursuit of language, while other schools or factions are merely doing linguistics. In the training of our graduate students, who have already chosen to walk the path of jaded academic one-up-manship, we feel no compunctions about letting rip on the inadequacies of the less enlightened. Indeed, our grad students are actually happiest when a class period is wholly devoted to decrying the weaknesses of the weak; nothing strokes their burgeoning ... [ 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 ]

— 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 ]

Lost Articles. [Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, a significant number of articles and features from Langue du Monde have been lost. Only the first half of one copy of Volume XVI, Number 1 of the journal has come down to us intact. The editors of SpecGram have digitized what we can for the Archives. The rest is, alas, lost to History.—Eds.] ... [ more ]

Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists. James D. McCawley, University of Chicago. (Note: May, the month in which Goodspeed day is celebrated, by recently established tradition, can be seen from the following to be a linguistically auspicious month), May 2, 1919. Baudouin de Courtenay concedes defeat in his bid for the presidency of Poland. May 3, 1955. Mouton & Co. discover how American libraries order books and scheme to cash in by starting several series of books on limericks. The person given charge of this project mishears and starts several series of books on linguistics. No one ever notices the mistake. May 5, 1403. The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his ... [ more ]

Scriptominoes I. by Trey Jones & Keith Slater. Traditional Dominosa is a puzzle game that requires you to pair numbers corresponding to the faces of dominoes. You are presented with a rectangular grid of numbers. Each number must be paired with one of its vertical or horizontal neighbors. As in a set of dominoes, each numerical value pairs exactly once with each other numerical value. See the original “Domiphones and Dominasals” (SpecGram CLXXXV.1) for a simple example if you are unfamiliar with the genre. Naturally, SpecGram’s version of the puzzle involves some linguistics-related twists. Rather than boring and obvious numerals, we use elements that linguists can enjoy and feel ... [ more ]

Center Embedding—the Pivotal Role of Military History. Hippolytus Drome, PhD, OBE, Professor of Linguistical History, Center for Embedding, Lima Peru. It was, naturally, with great interest that I began to read the paper of my generally esteemed colleague (Palin 2008) recently published in this generally esteemed journal. It was with a saddened heart that I finished reading. As previous authors have mentioned (M.Adam 2008, Palin 2008), the editors of this journal seem to have lost their senses, and need to re-evaluate the criteria on which they base their decisions to publish articles. Unfortunately, Palin himself contributes to, rather than alleviating, the problem which Küçük’s ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLXIV, Number 2; March 2012, MANAGING EDITOR Trey Jones SENIOR EDITOR Keith Slater EDITOR EMERITUS Tim Pulju Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXIV, No 2 CONSULTING EDITORS David J. Peterson Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Daniela Müller Mikael Thompson, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Bryan Allen Cem Bozsahin Jonathan Downie Jouni Maho Tel Monks Sheri Wells-Jensen, COMPTROLLER GENERAL Joey Whitford Quantity, not Quality ... [ 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 ]

Words of Dubious Roman Origin. ab, Numerius Negidius, Optimus Magister, et, Aulus Agerius, Bonus Liber, Spurius Carvilius School of Rhetoric, Rome. These puzzles are worth ¹/₂ point each. Despite their odd numbering, these puzzles aren’t too hard. Fill in the blanks based on the clues provided. 101, sick, _____, 157, polite, _____, 207, a kind of duty, _____, 501, not ego, _____, 512, bright, _____, 551, container top, _____, 557, angry, _____, 601, pickle type, _____, 1001, past action, _____, 1001, do, re, etc. _____, 1006, good with vigor, _____, 1011, stir, _____, 1101, grind, _____, 1501, not bright, _____, 1501, not open, not close, _____, 1551, not spicy, _____, 2102, imitate, _____, ... [ more ]

Linguists Need Prescriptivists. and probably Pig Latin, too. It has been theorized before that many of the perceived constraints on human language (and thus on any universal grammar of human language) are actually more likely to be constraints on the ways that human languages can change as they are transmitted from one generation to the next. On the other hand, language games, such as Pig Latin, Verlan, or Opish, often require transformations that violate the so-called “rules” of Universal Grammar™. Nonetheless, those who fully internalize these often twisted and sometimes broken languages can achieve a fluency parallel to their fluency as a native speaker of a “natural” language. Even more ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor, double-dot wide-o To the most respected Editors, In the fall I’ll be a first-year grad student in linguistics at R––– University. A couple of the current fourth-years told me that the International Phonetic Association was adding several new symbols for sounds that have previously been considered to have questionable status as phonemes. They said that the most contentious new addition was double-dot wide-O, a nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill. I’ve leafed through several back issues of SpecGram, Language, and a few other journals. I’ve searched the Linguist List archives, and scoured the web. I can’t find anything about it ... [ more ]

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