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, 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 ]

Degenerative Grammar, Our Current State of Linguistic Degradation. D. T. R. O’Rait, D. Bauch, and Wayne N. DeKay, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. “I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.” —Henry Miller Since the 1950s, linguistics has been wild with excitement over Chomsky’s insights, collectively known as “generative grammar.” As all non-linguists know, however, grammar as speakers encounter it in daily life is actually degenerative. In fact, years of mathematical modeling following the Minimalist Program have shown that the set of all possible well-formed sentences, ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCV, Number 2 Penultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham, Vincent Fish; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Luca Dinu; Associate Editors: Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Emily Davis, Gabriel Lanyi, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; All the Noise That’s Fit to Print; November 2025, ... [ more ]

Diacritics and Dire Critics, Recognising the Cultural and Indexing Role of Acçèntéd Chårâctërs. Horace Hemingway, Professor of Pointillism in Linguistics, The Δίς Λεγόμενον Centre for Endeepened Ideation. As dogs return to their own philosophies of linguistics, so do linguists return to the publishing enterprise, hoping that the internecine struggle against the vicissitudes of the critical arm will result in the Bacchanalian frenzy of the realisation that one’s words will appear in print in a publication whose cost is in inverse proportion to its readership. This Iliadic and Sisyphean interface between the frugal ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor. One of the few benefits of the so-called “Infobahn” as we hear the young folk are calling it these days, is the ability of our crack editorial staff to search out important works, so that we can republish them. Our goal in doing so is two-fold. First, we want to bring these works to a broader audience (including the seven or eight subscribers of SpecGram who still do not have access to said Infobahn). Second, we want to get an article, or even an issue, out the door with almost no work. One fascinating article we’ve found, entitled “A Primer in SF Xenolinguistics” provides a clever and thought-provoking overview of the topic its title ... [ more ]

The Devil’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. by David Krystal, Compiled by Adam Baker. C-command. A f-formal r-relationship m-made n-necessary by an u-unfortunate e-early c-commitment to b-binary t-trees. Computational linguistics. A sub-discipline of linguistics practiced by malicious killjoys who have no regard for the claims and generalizations of others. Consonant. A category of segment often occurring between vowels. See entry for vowel. Glottochronology. A misguided effort to measure the rate of linguistic change objectively. The only ridiculous linguistic theory to date to be widely acknowledged as such. Grammar, Generative. An approach to linguistics ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. To: Editor, SpecGram, From: CIA Threat Assessment Division, Re: Hazardous Dumpling Metaphors [CONFIDENTIAL], Dear Editor: Please keep this correspondence confidential, for reasons that we will detail below. We realize that this will probably come as quite a surprise to you, but CIA, under the direction of several of its head chefs, has for a number of years monitored telephone and internet correspondence in order to protect against certain cuisine-related national security threats. One of these (and we realize that is doubtless even more surprising) involves manipulations of complex dumpling topography, or ComDuT, as it is known. Eight years ago, a brilliant but rather unstable topographic ... [ more ]

How It Is Hanging. A Letter from a Junior Editorial Associate. This issue is Yet Another Mega Quote Issue. We had a Bodaciously Quotatious Mega Issue sometime back, before I worked here, and that went over well enough, so we thought we’d try it again. That, and we still have quotes left over from last time, which means I don’t have to do any more research. Boo-yah! This issue is also sporting a stylin’ new bold red cover, and a picture of Eddie Sapir. The old orange cover of Number 1’s past just wasn’t cutting the mustard any more. Red is the new orange. As for Ol’ Eddie, everyone was sure he’d been on a SpecGram cover before—sure as could ... [ more ]

Everything Linguists Ever Wanted To Know About Prime Numbers*. *but really shouldn’t have asked Adapted by A. Nonymous, Linguist, from various primary sources. How do various types of linguists go about analyzing, for themselves and their conspecifics, the primality of odd numbers greater than one? The methods vary by discipline, but the results are all equally valid. The Autosegmental Phonologist Like the other odd numbers, 9 is underlyingly specified for the feature [prime], but 9 surfaces as composite because of an [even] feature spread from 8. The Corpus Linguist 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, 11 is prime, and 13 is prime. Thus, in our corpus, odd numbers are prime at a probability ... [ more ]

Just Friend?. Helga Langenase & R. Lola Rennt, Universität zu Ausland. “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a separate word like me?” —The Possessive Cat-Dolls’ Criticizing or, in our overly sensitive times, merely even pointing out that there is some residual sexism inherent in various European languages has very much fallen out of favor among practitioners of linguistics and language science since the advent of the Political Correctness movement in the 1980’s (see Sharpe 2008 for recent, potentially disturbing developments in international policy concerning linguistic castigation on politically correct grounds). Early pioneers in the field ... [ 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 ]

A very short comparison between UH and UG. Johannes Damascenus nach Campenhausen, Seminar für Philosophie, Philologie und Philotechnie. Trends in joining the epitheton ‘universal’ to a hitherto perfectly self-sufficient and widely well-received noun are not an apanage of today’s¹ theorists, but have a long history in academic philosophising. This shall be illustrated by a short comparison between Universal Hermeneutics (Schleiermacher 1826) (henceforth UH) and Universal Grammar (Chomsky from 1955 onwards) (better known as UG). UH, UG, 1) The psychological difference between people who are in turn authors of texts is only relative, hence they can be compared (a principle which later ... [ more ]

Don’t Baby That Baby, Baby; by Butch McBastard; From Volume CLXVIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; October 2013 — Despite the attempts by those who study the phenomenon to dress it up in jargon (“caretaker speech”), cutesiness (“motherese”), or TLAs (IDS/CDS—“infant-/child-directed speech”), baby talk is still baby talk, and frankly as a linguist I’m insulted that you think I’d fall for that kind of whitewashing of such a despicable practice. That’s right, I said it, baby talk is despicable. (Read by Trey Jones.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor. As I noted in this space barely half a month ago, our last special supplemental monograph was about half an issue’s worth. Now, in this second half of the month, we are presenting a second half an issue’s worth of monographitude for your enjoyment and edification. As always, when we have worthy articles that are too long for SpecGram, we turn to our friends at Psammeticus Press (“Publishing anything that’s too long for Speculative Grammarian.”). The present article continues a long and proud tradition of anthropological and semi-anthropological linguistic treatises in the pages of SpecGram. The torch has been carried by such ... [ more ]

Announcing the rebirth of Speculative Anthropologist!!!. The little known sister publication of Speculative Grammarian, the most prestigious journal in all linguisticdom.. As the new publisher, editor-in-chief, historian, copy boy and militia commander of the too long silent Speculative Anthropologist, one of the greatest (although almost entirely unknown to modern anthropologists (except for a few old, denim wearing anthropologists living in the Northern Nevada desert and using AK-47s to protect themselves from coyotes, black helicopters and UN troops)) journals in the history of human kind, I am proud to announce the forthcoming rebirth of this prestigious scholarly publication in the Fall of 1998. This ... [ more ]

Etymology is for the Brids. A Letter from the Executive Editor. Dear Readers, Let’s face it, the history of words is about as interesting as a burlap sack filled with cow manure, and you get pretty much the same response if you dump either item onto a friend without warning. It’s fortunate that most departments stopped teaching historical linguistics after syntacticians declared it unfashionable in 1973. whankydoodle But even without historical linguistics, our field is rife with subdisciplines that are guaranteed to stun the average interlocutor. Most non-linguists achieve rigor mortis of the face after exposure to a mere five-word discourse on discourse, and psycholinguistics has been known to ... [ more ]

Gothic for Travellers. A. Judzis, the Visigoth. Making friends Hints for the traveller: The Goths are a very friendly and gregarious people. They will be quick to invite you to their homes for special ceremonies and entertainments. They also have hot tempers, so don't turn down an invitation to go home with a Goth. Good conversation starters are death, torture, eating and drinking. What do you do?, hwa taw-yis thoo, 𐍈𐌰 𐍄𐌰𐌿𐌾𐌹𐍃 𐌸𐌿 I'm a... ik im... 𐌹̈𐌺 𐌹́𐌼 tax collector, mow-tar-ees, 𐌼𐍉𐍄𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐍃 harlot, kahl-kyo, ... [ more ]

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