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1. How Linguistics Got Her Groove Back—Gunnr Guðr Entgegenlächeln (10 visits)

How Linguistics Got Her Groove Back1. Gunnr Guðr Entgegenlächeln, FG Klopstock Universiteit. Common wisdom—an oxymoron if ever there was one—has it that linguistics and linguists themselves have a bit of a reputation problem. Are linguists boring? Incomprehensible? Pointless? Evil? The contention of this paper is—given that perception is nine-tenths of reality—unless we ask, we’ll never know. To that end, I conducted a survey, which took place at a cocktail party, where there were many linguists and many non-linguists who were not particularly well-acquainted with linguistics. I interviewed 3 (±0.15) ... [ more ] Podcast!


2. Solutions to Recent Puzzles—An Update from the Puzzle Editors (9 visits)

Solutions to Recent Puzzles. An Update from the Puzzle Editors. There is no new puzzle this issue. If you are jonesing for a puzzle, you should still be working on the Summer Puzzle Mega Issue. There’s no way you are done yet, and the deadline isn’t until September 15th, 2009. You could win stuff, so get to it! However, for those of you who have been waiting on pins and needles to have the correct answers to a couple of recent puzzles revealed, it is time to put you out of your misery. Solutions are provided below. Certain people have most decidedly not been waiting for these solutions, though, because they confidently and correctly provided their own. Each will be receiving a SpecGram magnet of ... [ more ]


3. Castilian Language Chastised, Portugal Says “We Told You So”—Major Sharpe (9 visits)

Castilian Language Chastised, Portugal Says “We Told You So”. by Major Sharpe. In an unprecedented move, the European Union formed a new department last week called the European Linguistic Academy. The purpose of this new department is to scour the vocabularies of languages spoken within the EU’s borders and to eradicate words that may be considered politically incorrect. Its first move as a new regulatory body was to demand the banning of the word negro from the Castilian[1] language. Needless to say, the members of the Real Academia Española were none too happy with this decision. Speculative Grammarian was fortunate enough to get an interview with a member of the Academia. ... [ more ]


4. Son of Lingua Pranca—My Fair Linguist, or Male-Pygion—Tom Ernst and Evan Smith (9 visits)

My Fair Linguist, or Male-Pygion. Tom Ernst and Evan Smith. liberally adapted from G. B. Shaw and Lerner & Loewe1, NARR: London, 1978: The home of Professor Higgins (horse clops). A phonetic drill session in progress. The object: rectify Eliza Yanco’s speech. Y: And we werre at Charrles’ barr last night and... H: No, no, no! Why can’t you Yancos learn to speak! You must drop your postvocalic r’s, or else, Yanco, go home! Now repeat that sentence in front of you!, Y: (reading) The carrs on Marrs arre larrgely parrked nearr barrs. H: No, no, no! Send in that former student of mine! He learnt it well!, (Enter O), O: The cahs on Mahs ah lahgely pahked neah bahs. H: Now, Yanco, try it again!, Y: ... [ more ]


5. Babel—Discourse Gender in Hakka Creole—Keith Slater (9 visits)

Discourse Gender in Hakka Creole. Keith Slater, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. INTRODUCTION: Over the last few years, Hakka Creole (Taiwan) has gained considerable attention in linguistic circles, due to several truly strange features of the language. This article presents details of yet another such surprising discovery—one which may well revolutionize the way linguists deal with texts of substantial size in the future. THEORETICAL PREREQUISITES: (Editor’s note: Mr. Slater’s article was too long. Therefore, we cut out the part about theoretical prerequisites entirely. If, as a result, you have trouble understanding the rest of the article, too bad. If you really want to know what he said here, ... [ more ]


6. Linguimericks—Book ४१ (9 visits)

Linguimericks, Book ४१. A lover of words’s formations Was prone to nonsensish gyrations, And his many trickses With silly suffixes Oft led to strange verbifications —Κόμμα Ο᾿Κῶλον The Sinitical script of East Asia Is of plethoric Character nature, The study of which Makes the gray matter twitch, And may cause cranial hyperplasia —Morris Swadesh III, What it costs your prestige you must see And hark well, when you say [ də ] for [ ðiʲ ], The havoc you’re wreaking, For socially speaking, There’s just no variation that’s free —Pumptilian Perniquity, O Copier! My Copier! O Copier! My Copier! ... [ more ]


7. Extract from an Interview with Eglantine Lady Fantod, Dowager Professor of Philology at Cambridge University—Freya Shipley (8 visits)

Extract from an Interview with Eglantine Lady Fantod, Dowager Professor of Philology at Cambridge University. Eglantine Lady Fantod, the legendary raconteuse and grande dame of Golden Age linguistics, recalls halcyon days in a series of interviews with F. Shipley. The full memoir will be published in 2008 by Taradiddle Press, Oxford (8 volumes, price 17p). “How well I remember it all. A vanished world. Dear me, yes. Those gatherings at ‘Fluffy’ Jespersen’s place on Capri. The parties went on literally for weeks. I can still see Mary Haas dancing Salome on the moonlit beach, while that imp Harvey Pitkin caught live evidentials in the tide pools and dropped them down the backs of ... [ more ]


8. Legal Proceedings—A. Katz (8 visits)

THICKLEWAITE v. HORNSWORTH.. Court of Common Pleas, 1793*. This was an action in trover, brought under the following circumstances: Plaintiff was in possession of a considerable vocabulary, but was on the whole quite circumspect in the use of same, lest his neighbors acquire any portion thereof from him, whether by conversion or fraudulently, under cover of title. However, on one occasion, the wine having been unusually potent, his tongue being accidentally set loose, the following utterance escaped Plaintiff's lips, without his knowledge or consent: 'Should any of you miscreants attempt to increase your vocabulary at my expense, please be advised that I will not tolerate such latrociny!' This challenge sent his ... [ more ]


9. Vol CXLVII, No 4 (8 visits)

Speculative Grammarian. Volume CXLVII, Number 4. April 1993. Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXLVII, No 4 EDITOR, Tim Pulju RAMPAGING HORDE, Trey Jones (Hun), Anita Judzis (Visigoth), Aya Katz (Habiru), Don Reindl (Khazar) CONSULTANTS, Robert C. Norris, Keith W. Slater "What bear?", ... [ more ]


10. About Us (8 visits)

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 ] Podcast!


11. Crossword: Just In Case—Keith Slater (7 visits)

Crossword: Just In Case. by Keith Slater1. Across, 1. CASE: Pat hit the ball (as in Basque), 4. RRG equivalent of “subject” (abbr), 7. CASE: Pat hit the ball (as in Basque), 10. n non-restructuring infinitives (abbr), 11. Pollard and Sag’s model, without the structure? (abbr), 12. India’s smallest state, pre-nasalized, 14. Vocative address for Pirahã case expert Everett, 15. CASE: Pat went to Jakarta, 16. US Assoc. for Krzyzewski, Izzo, Calipari, et al, 17. Musician’s work opportunity, 1s.GEN, 19. Proposed Sulawesi subgroup where you might find a distinction ... [ more ]


12. Babel—Our Readers Mouth Off—Letters to the Editor (7 visits)

Our Readers Mouth Off. *Editor’s note—all replies to readers’ letters are written by the Editor-in-Chief. Views of other members of the editorial staff are likely to be more intelligent than those expressed here. In fact, forget likely to be—the truth is, you can count on it. & & & To whoever really writes Babel: Who is Tim Pulju? He can’t really be the editor of Babel, since running a photocopier requires at least a modicum of intelligence. Why has he never published any articles in journals that most linguists have actually heard of? Is he really a linguist, or just an escaped mental patient, as his writing seems to indicate? Or does he even ... [ more ]


13. Save the Adverbs (7 visits)

ANNOUNCEMENT Save the Adverbs. Recently, the Broadly-Construed Commission for Dying Language Forms (BCCDLF) launched a campaign to save rare parts of English speech. Given their cuddly nature and the fact that they are mostly easily understood, adverbs were quickly chosen to publicly front the campaign. Widely misclassified as commonly-spread in their natural environment, adverbs are usually threatened by the poorly understood but well-documented growth in the use of adjectives where an adverb is needed. Fast running out of use in English, where speedy communication is paramount, their emblematic (although not universal) -ly ending is becoming a rare-seen sight. The BCCDLF has therefore called for ... [ more ]


14. Realistic Linguistic Degrees—Advertisement (6 visits)

ADVERTISEMENT Realistic Linguistic Degrees. Are you tired of the real work that went into your research receiving no reward? Do you want your qualifications to reflect your actual skills? Our new Department of Realistic Linguistic PhDs has the course for you! Here are just a few examples: PhD in Crying over Data (3 years + 12 counselling sessions) If gathering your data meant staying up all night hoping your drunk informants weren’t lying about the local gavagai population, this degree is for you. PhD in Arcane University Admin Did you spent your time plying the department secretary with chocolate in the hope of getting the code for the department photocopier? This PhD shows you know your stuff. ... [ more ]


15. Dup Evidentials—Tim Pulju (6 visits)

Dup Evidentials. For the past seven years, I have been doing field work on Dup, a Papuan language spoken by about 2000 people in several highland villages. I have achieved a pretty good grasp of the workings of the language, with one exception: I can make no sense of the system of evidentials. Oh, I know what range of meanings each set of evidentials can express, and I know which syntactic positions evidentials can occur in; namely, all syntactic positions. Yet there seems to be no coherent system underlying the grouping of meanings assigned to one morpheme. To see what I mean, consider the example sentence below: (1), na-debe, tukop, sine-baba, Evid.-walk, woman, path-along, 'The woman walked along the path (I heard about it when ... [ more ] Book!


16. Annual Report to Shareholders, 2011—The Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board (6 visits)

Annual Report to Shareholders, 2011. The Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board. What is with you people? Don’t you have anything better to do than to send us impertinent letters about dividends? Haven’t you got conference papers to write? Get a life. If it means you’ll stop bothering us, we’ll tell you this much: sales are up; quality is up; profits are down. You can complain until you’re blue in the phonemes, but we are never going to sully our academic reputation with frivolous advertising. Top-notch editors are expensive (not that any of you would know that from personal experience), and last time we checked they weren’t giving paper and ink away. Listen, ... [ more ]


17. Archives (6 visits)

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 ]


18. Podcast—An Iñupik Linguistic Fragment (or, the Last Grammarian) (5 visits)

An Iñupik Linguistic Fragment (or, the Last Grammarian); by Metalleus; From Lingua Pranca, June 1978. — The following fragment was found in a shoe box at Indiana University. It was translated by Metalleus with the help of a Phi Beta Kappa key. The author is unknown. (Read by Trey Jones.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]


19. It Was a Dark and Stormy Noun...—1986 Edition—The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™ (5 visits)

It Was a Dark and Stormy Noun... 1986 Edition. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Some of our more, ahem, mature readers may remember that back in the mid-80’s Speculative Grammarian ran an annual Bulwer-Lytton-style contest, asking readers to submit the worst possible opening sentence for a linguistically-themed book. In fact, some of those same readers may have submitted entries, and may still be wondering whether or not they won. Sorry about that. The contest entries were in fact judged by the editorial board, but a dispute between Pulju (a Givónian functionalist) and Slater (a Lasnikian generativist) turned uncivil and the winners were never announced. In the meantime, ... [ more ]


20. Double-Sided Copy Theory—Teal Bissell Doggett, Candace Cardinal, Nathan Sanders, and Adam Ussishkin (5 visits)

Double-Sided Copy Theory. Teal Bissell Doggett, Candace Cardinal, Nathan Sanders, and Adam Ussishkin, University of California, Santa Cruz. Introduction. For years, Copy Theory (CT) in linguistics at UCSC has been devoted almost exclusively to Single-Sided Copy Theory (SSCT), at least within work done by the graduate student population. However, in her recent work on Xerox, Bissell (1997) demonstrated the existence of Double-Sided Copy Theory (DSCT). Motivation for DSCT. The primary reason for the pursuit of DSCT stems from Tree Preservation (see work by Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and others), stated in its purest form below: For every sheet, there exists one Tree that must be destructively modified. ... [ more ]


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Last updated Jul. 1, 2025.