SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Mix & Match ‖‖. by Max & Mitch Ninelette. The goal of this Mix & Match puzzle is to reconstitute a set of nine 9-letter words that have each had two trigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of trigrams with which to fill it up. Using each trigram once, fill the blanks in the table to form various nine-letter words. When you are done, three additional words will be revealed in the vertical direction for each puzzle. If you think you’ve figured out all the answers—that’s 24 nine-letter words!—submit your solution to the editors of SpecGram by January 1st, 2023, and you could win a prize. Solutions and ... [ more ]

Linguistic Contributions To The Formal Theory Of Big-Game Hunting¹. R. Mathiesen, Brown University. The Mathematical Theory of Big-Game Hunting must surely be ranked among the major scientific achievements of the twentieth century. That this is so is largely the work of one man, H. Pétard, in whose fundamental paper (1938) certain recent advances in mathematics and physics were employed with great skill to create a theory of unmatched—not to say unmatchable!—power and elegance. One must not, of course, dismiss Pétard’s predecessors totally out of hand: the field had a long and distinguished history as a technology, was raised to the rank of a science by the ... [ more ]

Ultimate Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know, (because they aren’t actually true), gathered at great personal risk of, psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira This 70th and final collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them. Test Question— Child Syntax. A child aged 1;4 is watching his father eat grapes. The child says: Daddy bbbb grape. In this utterance, ‘bbbb’ represents the ... [ 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 ]

Anti-Rhetoric. A Critical Methodology for Critically Assessing Critical Thinking. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, has a long and none-too-honorable history. Silly or stupid ideas, couched in the right language, may sway—and in many cases have swayed—the uncritical thinker. Anti-rhetoric is a method for assessing a listener’s susceptibility to rhetorical suasion. The technique itself is simple, yet powerful. Present two sides of a lopsided argument in a counter-lopsided way—using the full complement of rhetorical tricks to prop up the untenable position, while burdening the obviously logical position with the antithesis of each rhetorical device ... [ more ]

How Many is Umpteen?. A Linguistic and Mathematical Exploration and Explanation. brought to you by Ura Hogg, of Skaroo University¹, and the Letter U. We have all heard various people use the quasi-numerical expression umpteen to refer to a largish number of items, as in (1) below: (1) I have umpteen things to do before I can leave.² What I plan to do in this brief paper is to determine how many umpteen is. First I feel I must in part justify the claim that umpteen can in fact refer to an exact numerical quantity despite its varying use.³ Though we often use vague number expressions such as in (2) and (3) below, we nearly as often use exact, though large, ... [ more ]

A Braille Orthography for tlhIngan. Stovepipe Wells-Jensen. Origin of the System. In the Klingon Empire, charity and social programs, thought to be essentials of civilization in Federation space, are rare indeed. The dependent and weak-willed products of that softer society might thus be surprised to learn that education of blind Klingons has been a matter of course in the Empire for millennia. Klingons know that if their spirits are not broken by coddling, blind youngsters mature into self-sufficient citizens and skillful and deadly combatants. It is unwise to anger these warriors lest one find oneself suddenly alone in a darkened corridor with a very serious problem. A tactile writing system was thus a ... [ more ]

A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese. It has long been a tenet of stratificational theory that stratificational notation is adaptable to extralinguistic structures. The contention of this paper is that not only can we use relational networks in this way, but that in fact a stratificational diagram is superior to, and should supplant, the traditional tool for visual transmission of information, namely written representation of natural human language. As an example, compare the traditional version of instructions for preparing macaroni and cheese with the new and improved version. (The text is that of “Directions,” Food Club Macaroni and Cheese Dinner, Wgt. .453# (the package is distributed by ... [ more ]

More On Moundsbar. My title is, despite its melisonance, not quite apt, since my previous note on this strange language, published in the journal Quaestio, was in error in almost every respect. Afterthought prompts the conclusion that this was due to my having obtained most of the data by telephone. In any event it turns out that the many vowel phones of Moundsbar can be wrestled down to seven vowel phonemes: an open central unrounded, written /a/, two close back rounded, two close front unrounded, and two central vowels, a higher and a lower, which can only be described as square. Examples follow: mi, ‘one juju bean’ me, ‘he flies up’ su, ‘he flies down; two juju ... [ 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 ]

The Incipient Colonialism of IPA. Wallace Workaday, Professor of Meat Flapping in Linguistics, The Δίς Λεγόμενον Centre for Endeepened Ideation. If to describe is to own then to transcribe is to enthrone. From the grooming of a sciento-social race with the fast adoption of the Latin alphabet as the foundation of the linguistic enterprise, instantiated and exemplified by /k/ and /æ/ to cordoning off its extent with the refusal to acknowledge the / double-dot wide o / and the / ʙ –/, the International Phonetic Alphabet subjugates the subconscious mind of the researcher by enforcing a Platonian cave of Pavlovian conditioning. This much ... [ more ]

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 ]

The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective. Are you in a world of linguistic hurt? The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective (SLAC) will offer you empirical, empathic, emphatic advice you can use!^* Remember, if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, then you don’t need advice! So, if you need advice, trust us—and cut yourself some SLAC! ... Dear SLAC, Thanks ever so for the recent advice column on focus. All this while I’ve been pluralising it as feces (pron: [fekes]) on analogy with man~men and ox~oxen. Anyway, as a health conscious diner with an obsession for half-rhymes, the column got me thinking: ... [ more ]

World's Linguistic Fundamentals Sound. SpecGram Wire Services, Geneva: Ministers of the G-7, the group of 7 major world's languages, issued a joint statement today declaring that speculations about a worldwide linguistic crisis are unfounded, and reaffirming that international linguistic fundamentals remain sound. The ministers resumed their meetings early Tuesday after Monday evening's session was disrupted by protesters demanding that member language Hindi be renamed Hindi-Urdu. The protesters' attempt to bring the issue to a floor vote was defeated by a coalition of English, seeking to retain its numerical advantage, and Chinese, whose delegates are rumored to fear that admitting Urdu might set a precedent which could ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT You Can Earn A Degree In Langualogy, at the, Deictic Institute of Modern Blogging, University of Lower Bougravia, Newark, New Jersey Campus Langualogy is the exciting new field of the study of language. The Department of Langualogy is comprised of former eminent scholars in the field of Linguistics who have realized that “linguistics” would be the study of “lingues” and that’s just dumb. These famous academicians include: Derk Bikerton, Leonarb Bloornfield, Noarn Chornsky, Davib Chrystal, Bemard Cornrie, Mossis Halle, Williarn Laboff, Jorge Lakov, Stephen Pingker, Debra Tarrnen, The goal of Langualogy is to explore new, but familiar-sounding frontiers of the human ... [ more ]

Have Yourselves a Very Linguisticky Christmas. By Yuletide Editor X. Mus. Ding-dong merrily on high front vowel! ‘Hark!’ the herald angels sing, sang, sung! Good King Wenceslas ~~out-looked~~ looked out. Christmas is nearly ’pon us after a year more unexpected than the most suppletive of suppletions. A time, at least traditionally, for foul weather, increased energy bills, family fights and overly familiar TV listings, Christmas also boasts a linguistic dimension that is as much underplayed, under-referenced and misunderstood as it will not be underlined, underscored and underpinned. So let’s undertake that now. Consider the word itself: ... [ more ]

The Speculative Grammarian Survey of Grammar Readers. Morris Swadesh III. In 2014 SpecGram published our Survey of Grammar Writers in three parts. As a follow-up to that revealing research, we offer here a survey of the corresponding consumers: Grammar Readers. Respondents. We sent our survey to 457.5 professional linguists,¹ of whom 233.5 returned it, for a response rate of about 51%. We asked respondents to self-identify with a primary linguistic subdiscipline from a standard list. Responses broke down as follows: Typologist, 94%, Phonemicist, 2%, Historical Linguist, 1%, Speculator, 1%, Syntacticizer, 1%, No preference², 1%, From this, we can probably conclude ... [ more ]

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