Most Popular Pages—Today

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1. Ministry of Propaganda (11 visits)

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 ]


2. Shigudo, Reluctantly—Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain (6 visits)

Shigudo, Reluctantly. Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton. In 1963, at the tender age of 24, I found myself on an expedition deep in the Amazon Basin, up a smallish tributary of the Río Ucayali. There we encountered a well-established tribe of indigenous people, numbering close to 400 and living in relative isolation, who called themselves the Shigudo. Several members of the tribe spoke nearly fluent Spanish,1 and we were able to communicate quite effectively with them. As our expedition was chiefly anthropological in nature, and the Shigudo were, anthropologically ... [ more ] Book!


3. Pseudo-Psiblings™—And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families—Trey Jones (5 visits)

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 ]


4. Merchandise (5 visits)

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 ]


5. Vol CLV, No ε (5 visits)

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLV, Number ε ; October 2008, Special Supplemental Issue Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLV, No ε MANAGING EDITOR, Trey Jones, EDITOR EMERITUS, Tim Pulju, SENIOR EDITOR, Keith Slater, “Those who forget history are, doomed to do badly on the test. ... [ more ]


6. Vol CLXV, No 4 (4 visits)

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 ]


7. Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome (4 visits)

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 ]


8. A Review of Wailin’ Jennings’ Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Linguists—Praenomen Gentilicium Cognomen, Esq. (4 visits)

A Review of Wailin’ Jennings’ Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Linguists . by Praenomen Gentilicium Cognomen, Esq.. Well-known kʌn.trɪ.n.wɛs.tʌrn star Wailin’ Jennings—son of famed rhotacism and blues crooner Moanin’ Jennings and grandson of beloved buggie-wuggie icon Hollerin’ Jennings—has released a groundbreaking new album. This, his tenth album in a twenty-three year career, is poised to become his artistically and stylistically most successful effort yet. Jennings has masterfully blended studio phonology, live morphology, and engineered syntax to create some of the slickest music ever made, without ... [ more ] Podcast!


9. SpecGram Language Placement Services—Advertisement (4 visits)

ADVERTISEMENT SpecGram Language Placement Services. As any sociolinguist can tell you, language vitality is all about status. And frankly, most languages don’t have it. Does yours?1 Most languages haven’t even taken the basic step of hiring a part-time publicist. Nor can most attract a truly talented linguist (or an unscrupulously devious one) whose tireless publication efforts can usher them into international prominence. Fortunately, SpecGram is here to help. SpecGram Language Placement Services offers your language the fame it deserves, at a price for any budget. Available Packages. “Back from the Brink” Language Tune-Up. Script consultation ... [ more ]


10. LingDoku II—More, Better, Harder—Trey Jones (4 visits)

LingDoku II. More, Better, Harder. Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Washington D.C.. In the April issue, Speculative Grammarian made 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. Our original LingDoku puzzle simplified the logical reasoning component of traditional SuDoku, and introduced a thin veneer of linguistics to create an artificial barrier to participation for non-linguists. The solution to last issue’s puzzle is given here. In all likelihood it is the correct solution, but nothing in life is certain. Well, as it turns out, the original LingDoku puzzle is ... [ more ]


11. Relaunched Journal—Municipal Journal of Language Devolution (4 visits)

RELAUNCHED JOURNAL— Municipal Journal of Language Devolution . There has been a lot of interest in environmental influences on language, including the emerging field of geophonetics. Other publishers can jump on the bandwagon; Psammeticus Press already has one of its own! (Two, if you count the 1997 Geo Prizm used by our world-infamous house band, Fauxnetikx.) One of the oldest workhorses in our stable of highly profitable journals is the Municipal Journal of Language Devolution. Once an outlet for prescriptivist screeds, its original nay-saying editors, Usain E. Trong and Grumby Kerr Mudgin, spent 46 years shouting into the winds of language change until they were hoarse. Now that they have ... [ more ]


12. A Redundancy—and Revitalisation—of Competencies: Competence in Competence—Compo Tenz (4 visits)

A Redundancy— and Revitalisation— of Competencies: Competence in Competence. Compo Tenz, Professor in Competence, University of Comptance in Quompuy, Tennessee. When the undergraduate student of linguistics has finally hacked her way through the left-periphery,1 drawn more tree diagrams than there are trees in the Amazon,2 merged move with whatever move merges with, and bared the structure of her fazed soul before bare phrase structure, often all that will be left at the end may be a residual echo of some vague recollection of the flitting memory of the idea of Chomskyan competence; to wit: the ideal speaker-listener in a perfectly homogenous ... (you know the ... [ more ]


13. SpecGram, Quarterly—A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief (4 visits)

SpecGram, Quarterly. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. [Note: Due to a scheduling error 0 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 ]


14. Ple Nvæn-ila Fieldwork Puzzle—Claude Searsplainpockets (4 visits)

Ple Nvæn-ila Fieldwork Puzzle. Claude Searsplainpockets. and the SpecGram Puzzle Elves™ Claude Searsplainpockets recently completed several months of fieldwork among a tribe known as the Ple Nvæn-ila. He said that he found the language and the culture to be “quite respectable, but not really worthy of the Bizarre Grammars of the World series.” To keep all of Claude’s hard work from going completely to waste, we’ve decided to turn all his data into a puzzle of sorts. Here is your task: Translate these two sentences, to and from Ple Nvæn-ila, based on Claude’s field notes, given further below (after the Intermission). I heard that two big weird obnoxious ... [ more ]


15. The Perplexed Linguist’s Guide to English Departments—Athanasious Schadenpoodle (4 visits)

The Perplexed Linguist’s Guide to English Departments. Now with Footnotes! Athanasious Schadenpoodle. So, Dear Reader, you have completed your Ph.D. in Linguistics (yay you!), run headlong into the grim realities of the modern job market (poor you!), broadened your ideas about possible teaching contexts (smart you!) and landed a gig in an English department (lucky you?). You’ve potentially got the base of the Maslovian pyramid covered for at least a semester, but you’re in a rather alien environment, surrounded by people who talk funny in a way that Dialectology 501 never prepared you for and who have some markedly odd folkways. Some culture shock is inevitable, but a little knowledge can go a long ... [ more ]


16. Tenth Anniversary Testimonials (3 visits)

Tenth Anniversary Testimonials. “SpecGram is probably the bravest linguistics journal on the planet. No other journal had the enormous integrity needed to print my piece on Shigudo, which has launched my emeritus career into the stratosphere.” —Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ “We at the X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies appreciate Speculative Grammarian’s commitment to communication, compromise, and clarity in the name of collaboration. As we congratulate them on their Tenth Digiversary, we look forward to continuing to work with SpecGram for many years to come.” —Coöper A. Shinn, XQK Public ... [ more ]


17. The Legend of Trey—Hemeralda Ilissey (3 visits)

The Legend of Trey. Hemeralda Ilissey, Dean of the Tell-Tale Tall Tales Telling Bureau (Emerita since first appointment), Huāxyacac Community Center. Once upon a time, there were The Ancient Linguists. They lived happily ever after, doing what linguists have happily done ever after, although, or perhaps because, they were not linguists to start off with. They were grammarians, which means that they grammared, just like summerians summerized in the warm sunshine, or barberians practiced close shaves and draconians close shoves. The tribe that spawned the first dynasty of these professional language nerds went by the name of Pāṇini, the collective patronymic for Pāṇino, a delicacy of (obscure) ... [ more ]


18. Cartoon Theories of Linguistics—Part ж—The Trouble with NLP—Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. (3 visits)

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP. Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. Please review previously discussed materials as needed. Now that that is taken care of, let us consider why Natural Language Processing (or, its alter-ego, Computational Linguistics) has not been the resounding success regularly predicted by the NLP faithful: We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry/over-ripe. Time/Fruit flies like a(n) arrow/banana. pretty little girl’s school crying computational linguist Up next: Lexicostatistics vs Glottochronology. References, Baeza-Yates, Ricardo and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information ... [ more ] Merch! Book!


19. Vol CLXXXVI, No 1 (3 visits)

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXXVI, Number 1 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Senior Editor; Jonathan Downie, Senior Editor, Pete Bleackley, Contributing Editor; Associate Editors: Mark Mandel, Deak Kirkham; Assistant Editors: Emily Davis, Vincent Fish, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Chris Brew, Christian DiCanio, Joe McAvoy, Steve Politzer-Ahles, Mary Shapiro, Megan Stevens; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Like Blunt Force Trauma to Your Broca’s Area; November 2019 ... [ more ]


20. Center Embedding—the Pivotal Role of Military History—Hippolytus Drome, PhD, OBE (3 visits)

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 ]


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Last updated Feb. 6, 2026.