Most Popular Pages—Today
• Today • Last 7 days • Last 30 days • All Time •
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 ]
Improving L2 Performance with Pirahã Shigudo, and Simple English. The effects of syntactic and semantic priming on successful L2 communication. Jeannot Van Tricasse, Jules Verne University, Paris, France. As is well known, students of foreign languages are often frustrated by their lack of ability to express thoughts of normal complexity in the language they are studying.1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 This frustration can easily turn into a bitterness that leaves the student unable or unwilling to continue their language studies, even after a year or more of study.11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 This is an unfortunate state of affairs for many reasons. Bilingualism has been implicated in ... [ more ]
ADVERTISEMENT The Mann de Man Language Institute. Foreign language instruction has grown by leaps and bounds as the benefits of the communicative approach have made themselves felt far and wide. At the same time, language instructors pay lip service to the importance of cultural factors in language education and intercultural communication. However, only our service thoroughly and consistently applies the important insights of cultural factors to language instruction. Take, for example, the common practice of “face-to-face” instruction. While this is ideally suited to cultures like China and Japan that place great emphasis upon saving face, it is useless for learning the nuances of language use in ... [ more ]
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 ]
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 ]
SHRLI: Stealthy High Resolution Linguistic Intake. A case study in semi-unobtrusive quasi-automated pseudo-naturalistic fieldwork. undertaken by Hellgrün Dunkelblau, Ph.D. and Myrkur-Viviti Темнота Department of Computational Fieldwork, Caenoches Technical School, Darkness Falls, Massachusetts, On January 1st, 2005, Caenoches Technical School officially opened the four-story Ciemność Mallumo Hall for the Humanities, a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility for housing four growing humanities departments: Classics, English, Linguistics, and Psychology. Over the previous year, while the building was being constructed, the chairs of the four ... [ more ]
Son of Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. IULC. November 1979. ... edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Son of, ^ Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... i u linguistics club, ... [ more ]
Calquing Greatness, How Other Fields Find Success Borrowing From Linguistics. P. Ạȧṛȯṇī Mhɯ̈sz & Nıöll ʘ’Dȷ̊ı̥e, Interdimensional Panlinguistic Alliance (IPA), Earth-8311. In a world where Linguistics is regarded as the Cæsarissa of the Social Sciences, it is only natural that the Lesser Disciplines seek to emulate the matter and form of her successes. After much discussion, debate, and dialogue—including careful consideration of the ability of non-linguists to emulate (or merely ape?) the ideas & ideals, processes & procedures, and techniques & technology of Linguistics—the Father ... [ more ]
SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Black Leather Issue, Volume CL, Number 2; April 2005, Special Interactive 3D content, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CL, No 2, MANAGING EDITOR, Trey Jones, EDITOR EMERITUS, Tim Pulju, SENIOR EDITOR, Keith Slater, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Bryan Allen, Mark de Vries, Martin Hilpert, Edward Johnson, Steven Lulich, Sheila McCann, Jamin Pelkey, Mikael Thompson, Bill Spruiell, Rob van der Sandt, Joey Whitford, There is no spoon. ... [ 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 ]
SpecGram Film and Media Club, Examines ‘Wannabe’. with Linguist to the Stars, Mr Manfred M. McManus. ‘If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends’ is among the most iconic lines of the 90s, up there with Hanson’s mighty ‘Mmmbop ba dupi dop, ba doo bop’ and, Whigfield’s celestial ‘Da ba da dan, dee dee dee da nee na na na’. And the video for the song to which it belongs, the Spice Girls’ debut single, ‘Wannabe’ has been credited with having had a greater impact on take-up in local sports groups than any single Olympics since 1908. But has the world of linguistics yet given this resonant piece of lyrical excellence its due? ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIII, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Vincent Fish; Associate Editors: Luca Dinu, Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Emily Davis, Andrew Lamont, Gabriel Lanyi, Daniela Müller, Steve Politzer-Ahles; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; January 2024, ... [ more ]
ANNOUNCEMENT Further Evidence for, Language, as a, Virus from Space, A Symposium in Two Movements. Fred Hoyle has forcefully and, many would say, persuasively argued for the existence of viruses floating free in space. Hoyle, Wickranmasinghe, and Watkins in their seminal work, Viruses from Space go so far as to suggest that life on Earth may have been seeded by such viruses. These claims are certainly worthy of consideration, but they fail to address an important corollary: if life on Earth was seeded by viruses from space, then shouldn't such viruses--most likely completely different ones, in fact--still be falling to the Earth's surface from time to time? After abstractly pondering these facts for several years in ... [ more ]
The Prescriptivist Handbook, 213th Edition, from The Editors of Psammeticus Press, Published 2024. 150 pages Word connoisseurs, language mavens, and members of similar non-professions everywhere can rejoice, as Psammeticus Press has just released the 213th edition of The Prescriptivist Handbook, the acclaimed1 language-adjacent publication used by millions worldwide. Since its first edition in 1811, The Prescriptivist Handbook has helped countless people prevent the degradation of the English language into senseless illogicality by introducing linguistic innovations to enable them to speak efficiently, logically, and (most importantly) correctly. Not only that, its various ... [ more ]
Overheard* in the Linguistics Student SpecGram Editor’s Lounge. Chesterton “The Jesterton” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV, Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers**, Third-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton All names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent. Etymologically: Are chiasmopodes from non-linguistic articles okay? Transitively: We generally don’t use non-linguistic chiasmopodes... though chiasmopodes is an awesome word! Anonymuncule: Will someone please define chiasmopodes? I can’t find a ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXIX, Number 1 ... Trey Jones, Managing Editor, Keith Slater, Senior Editor, Bill Spruiell, Consulting Editor, Tim Pulju, Editor Emeritus; Associate Editors: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Pete Bleackley, Virginia Bouchard, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, Jonathan Downie, Tel Monks, Daniela Müller, Tuuli Mustasydän, Cathal Peelo, David J. Peterson, Callum Robson, Zac Smith, Tangent Wong; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Watch Out Guys— We’ve Got a Bad-Asterisk Over Here; January 2014 ... [ more ]
World of Language. The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia. Volume I, Number 2. February 1991. World of Language: The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, ... [ more ]
• Today • Last 7 days • Last 30 days • All Time •
Last updated Jan. 25, 2026.