Most Popular Pages—Today

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1. AutoGrammatikon™ (6 visits)

The Speculative Grammarian Auto­Gram­matikon™ Quasi-Universal Translator℠. On several occasions, mention has been made of the AutoGrammatikon™ Quasi-Universal Translator℠ in the pages of SpecGram; in the current epoch, these references date back as early as at least 2004.1 In the following years there have been denials,2 mentions,3 more4 mentions,5 leaked internal documents,6 and even some early oral history7 (accompanied as it was by additional denials). Throughout this time the consistent official stance of the Editorial board of SpecGram has been to deny that the AutoGrammatikon™ exists, ... [ more ]


2. Archives (5 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 ]


3. Merchandise (4 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 ]


4. Psammeticus Press (4 visits)

Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, BOOKS, SERIES, and MORE The following valuable volumes, spectacular series, and interesting items have been released with pride by Psammeticus Press, an academic publishing house founded in honor of the first and purest of linguistic inquirers: one might criticize his methods, but who could quibble with his results? Follow the links below to learn more about these fabulous books and excellent series, each destined to become a classic in the field. Warehouse Moving Sale We’ve lost the lease on our warehouse and anything we can’t sell we have to move—or rent interns from Speculative Grammarian to do it—and that’s expensive! Help us out and buy a ... [ more ]


5. Podcast—Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLV (4 visits)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLV — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Pete Bleackley. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss something that tries to look like iconicity, and then share their favorite linguistical jokes. ... [ listen ]


6. Pseudo-Psiblings™—And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families—Trey Jones (4 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 ]


7. JLSSCNC—Vol I, No 3—Better Words and Morphemes (3 visits)

Better Words and Morp[h]emes. The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia. Volume I, Number 3. May 1991. Better Words and Morpemes: The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, ... [ more ]


8. Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics (3 visits)

Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics. by Trey Jones. As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been. Let the adventure begin ... [ more ] Book!


9. Advertisement—American Anthropophagist (3 visits)

Volume 93, Number 4, December 1991 — American, Anthropophagist — Reinterpretation of 'Eat your heart out' and Other, Incorporative Metaphors in Modern English, J. Dahmer — The Planarian Ideal: Transmission of Intelligence Through the, Digestive Process, Toby Eaton — Oats is for Scots, but What About the Irish?, J. Swift — All I Really Wanted to Do Was Play Baseball With the Guys, G. Rendl — Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars: Myth or Confessional Narrative?, Kali Bhan — What Shortage? Malthus was a Dope. E. Gein — Journal of the American Anthropophagological Association, It no longer costs and arm and a leg to subscribe to our ... [ more ]


10. The Prescriptivist Handbook, 213th Edition—Book Announcement from Psammeticus Press (3 visits)

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 ]


11. The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature (3 visits)

The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature. Welcome to Online Selections from The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature, researched, compiled, and edited by the lexicographers, etymologists, and philologists of Speculative Grammarian. The editors of Speculative Grammarian are delighted to present selections of the fifty-volume lexicographic opus, The Compleat Encyclopaedia of Compendious Historical Lexicons of Obscure and Archaic Vernacular and Nomenclature, online for the first time ever. The Compleat Encyclopaedia is a one-of-a-kind resource, compiled ... [ more ]


12. The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics (3 visits)

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 ]


13. Falsehoods About Linguistics—N. Correct, N. Accurate, and Aaron Nius (3 visits)

Falsehoods About Linguistics. Compiled by N. Correct, N. Accurate, and Aaron Nius. Inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s “False­hoods Programmers Believe About Names” here is a list of ideas, thoughts, and assumptions about linguists and linguistics that come up from time to time, but none of which are necessarily true. Linguists know what a language is. Linguists know what a word is. Linguists know what linguistics is. Linguists can tell you the correct way of doing linguistics. Linguists can tell you the correct way of speaking a language. All linguists know multiple, if not many, languages. All linguists love languages. All linguists enjoy learning, and learning about, different languages. Knowing how to ... [ more ]


14. Myriad Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (3 visits)

Myriad 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 41st 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. The following data are from different children. The context of the child utterances is given in angled brackets: <Describing a pillow fight> (a) I kicked him the pillow. ... [ more ]


15. Books (3 visits)

SpecGram Books. A number of books and book-like entities (including various monographs) have come into existence in and around Speculative Grammarian over the years. Here we’ve collected links to all of their digital and corporeal manifestations in one place for your convenience. ... The Splendid Words, by James S. Pasto,; January 2019 The tale of a man obsessed, driven by a hunger and thirst to uncover—he knows not what! Far past reason, he has hunted and hated, been haunted and humiliated. Now his search has borne fruit—discover whether it is bitter or sweet! Available to read online. ... The History of Rome, by Tim Pulju; July 2018 Speculative ... [ more ]


16. Lingua Pranca (3 visits)

I U Linguistics Club. Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. June 1978. ... i u linguistics club, edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... [ more ]


17. Titles in Fantasy Linguistics—Announcement from Scholartastic Books (3 visits)

ADVERTISEMENT, Titles in Fantasy Linguistics, from Scholartastic Books, ––– Now Available! –––. Here are even more titles from Scholartastic Books’ FantLing division that you might enjoy reading: Jonathan Livingston Suprasegmental, by Richard Back-Vowel The Singulara Series, by Terry Books The Word of Singulara The Elf Tones of Singulara The Whispering of Singulara Articulatemis Fowl, by Eoin Configurational The Tone is Rising (series), by Susan Copular Underspecified, Overtone The Tone Is Rising Gerundwitch The Grave King Silver on the Syntactic Tree The Little Principle and Parameter, ... [ more ]


18. Panini Press (3 visits)

— http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress Welcome to the online home of Panini Press, an academic publishing house formerly dedicated to the proposition that Linguistics is the noblest of the academic fields, but now with a focus on Subjects of more relevance to the Working Linguist’s everyday life and career. ❦पा Important announcements from Panini Press: ❧ Word Problems for Linguists (November 2025): Linguists, we here at Panini Press know you thought that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill. However, the real world often has other plans, so, for your own good, Dr. Barbara Millicent Roberts’s new book, Word ... [ more ]


19. Language Evolution and the Acacia Tree—Sean Geraint (3 visits)

Language Evolution and the Acacia Tree. by Sean Geraint. Last year, renowned treethnographer Garik Roblerks noticed that two books on the evolution of language had strikingly similar covers. Both Christiansen & Kirby’s Language Evolution and Fitch’s The Evolution of Language boasted an acacia tree in the sunset. On closer inspection, these turned out to be different pictures of the same tree. ... A comparison of the books, by Christiansen & Kirby (left) and Fitch (right) Having spent a year tracking trees in Kenya, I can confirm that the tree is from Maasai Mara National Reserve. The tree has attracted a lot of attention since its entrance into the glamorous world of book cover design, and I ... [ more ] Book!


20. The History of Rome—Advertisement (3 visits)

Attention, Holiday Shoppers!. Speculative Grammarian Press is proud to present.... Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome is the perfect gift for people who never like anything you get for them. They probably won’t like this, either, but at least it’s cheap! Order online from www.SpecGram.com/Rome, or wherever fine books are sold. If your local booksellers don’t stock it, then clearly, they don’t sell fine books. ... [ more ]


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Last updated Apr. 10, 2026.