Most Popular Pages—Today

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1. Merchandise (11 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 ]


2. Archives (10 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. Vol CXCV, No 3 (10 visits)

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CXCV, Number 3; February 2026, C HIEF C AT H ERDER &, A RBITER OF THE L AST W ORD, Trey Jones, O RDER OF THE, S PECULATIVE P SAMMETICOI, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, Tim Pulju, Bill Spruiell, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXCV, No 3, H EAD OF L EARNING, L INGUISTICS T HROUGH, S ATIRE AND P UNS, Jonathan Downie, S YNTACTICO- P OET &, U NDER- E DITOR OF, U NDER- E DITING, Deak Kirkham, S ENIOR P UZZLING, T EST P ILOT, Vincent Fish, K EEPER OF THE, E DITORIAL T EA C ADDY, Pete Bleackley, A SSOCIATE D EPUTY, A SSISTANT S UB- M ANAGER, OF S ATIRICAL S UCCESS, Luca Dinu, O RTHOGRAPHER- A T- L ARGE, Daniel Swanson, D ILETTANTE E MERITUS, Tel ... [ more ]


4. Ministry of Propaganda (7 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 ]


5. Vol CLXV, No 4 (6 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 ]


6. The Origin of Tonal Consonants in Native American Languages—Iain Paul Anderson (6 visits)

The Origin of Tonal Consonants in Native American Languages. Iain Paul Anderson, Junior Data Scientist (FTC), Munich University Deep Diachronic Linguistics Experiment. While preparing data from a sample of Native American languages for mass lexical comparison, I noticed a curious feature of the phonology of these languages. We normally expect tone to occur on vowels, but a large number of the languages in the sample contained consonants marked for tone. It was always the same four consonants on which tonal marking occurred—the palatal stop and approximant, and the alveolar fricatives, and they always contrasted rising tone against unmarked—no other tone was marked on these consonants, nor were ... [ more ]


7. Lost Media: Linguistics Rock!—The SpecGram Media Elves™ (6 visits)

Lost Media: Linguistics Rock!. The SpecGram Media Elves™. In 1974, following the success of Schoolhouse Rock!, the independent production company Lingo Lango Longo released Linguistics Rock!, a linguistics-themed animated musical educational program similar in style to Schoolhouse Rock!. Unfortunately, the style, the branding, the episode titles, the characters, and the music were all very similar to Schoolhouse Rock!—so much so that Lingo Lango Longo’s Leado Lawyero, Leo Lombardo—in a stunning act of moral courage—pulled the plug on the whole enterprise before Lingo Lango Longo could be sued into oblivion. All that ... [ more ]


8. Cartoon Theories of Linguistics—Part ж—The Trouble with NLP—Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. (5 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!


9. Vol CLVII, No 4 (4 visits)

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLVII, Number 4; December 2009, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLVII, No 4, CONSULTING EDITORS, Ken Miner, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jouni Maho, Daniela Müller, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Yahya Abdal-Aziz, Jonathan Downie, Carin Marais, Mary Shapiro, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kean Kaufmann, Joey Whitford, 99% more inquiring than Linguistic Inquiry, ... [ more ]


10. Multitudinous Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (4 visits)

Multitudinous 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 42nd 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. On Deixis. The meaning of deictic words is not in linguistic forms. By using deictics, speakers flout the maxim of manner. Deictics are grammatical words with no lexical meaning to specify what the speaker means. Deictics ... [ more ]


11. De La SpecGrammatologie—A Letter to Future Historians of Satirical Linguistics—Trey “Jacquey D” Jones (4 visits)

De La SpecGram­matologie . A Letter to Future Historians of Satirical Linguistics, from the Editor-in-Chief, Trey “Jacquey D” Jones. Future SpecGrammologists will debate whether this period in the history of SpecGram is “Early Modern” or “Late Moron” or even “Proto-Interplanetary”—and whether we were titans or pipsqueaks, our scribblings impactful or inconsequential. They will undoubtedly furrow their collective brow as they attempt to decipher the opaque and recalcitrant tea leaves of some future tattered remains of the SpecGram archive and hazard ill-formed guesses at our true meaning and significance. ... [ more ]


12. Linguistic Poems for Valentine’s Day (4 visits)

Linguistic Poems for Valentine’s Day. From the SpecGram Podcast. ... For your amusement as Valentine’s Day approaches, we present a collection of recordings of various poems that have appeared in SpecGram and our sister publications over the years, all read by Editor-in-Love Jonathan van der Meer. These vignettes of love, lust, longing, loss, and linguistics are sure to stir your heart. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram by Alex Savoy; From Volume CLXI, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; March 2011. My Love is Like a Colorless Green Simile by Rasmus Burns; From Volume CLXIV, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; March 2012. Love Queries of a Linguist by John Miaou; From ... [ more ]


13. Biolinguistic Modelling Simulation—Nom Compik & Piraha Sanpitakuk (4 visits)

In this study we explore how the linguist interacts with a wide range of structural variability by simulating not only the behavior of the trees themselves but also the behavior of the linguist. ... [ more ]


14. Vol CLXX, No 3 (3 visits)

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXX, Number 3 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Bill Spruiell, Senior Editor, Sheri Wells-Jensen, Consulting Editor; Associate Editors: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson; Assistant Editors: Pete Bleackley, Virginia Bouchard, Florian Breit, Callum Robson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Bethany Carlson, Peter Carrillo, Michael Covarrubias, Rachel Jamison, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks, Daniela Müller, Tuuli Mustasydän, Zac Smith, Yuval Wigderson; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; The Case-Marker is a Lie; July 2014 ... [ more ]


15. Occam’s Taser—Advertisement (3 visits)

ADVERTISEMENT Occam’s Taser. Governments, Do your internal security forces find that truncheons and handcuffs can be non-parsimonious? Studies indicate that a pair of handcuffs is needed for each criminal and that water cannon only drench on average 12% of unruly, rioting crowds. But there is an answer. Equip your security forces with the all-new Occam’s Taser. It’s a cheap and easy method of controlling disorder and suppressing dissent in an effective and efficient way. It’s not philosophy! Buy Occam’s Taser today! (Batteries not supplied) ... [ more ]


16. Strangecraft, Part I—Ruffles and Blood—Mikael Thompson (3 visits)

Strangecraft. by Mikael Thompson. ... - I -, Ruffles and Blood. A copy of the book on a table It is perhaps best to begin my chronicle as I stood on the deck of the freighter taking me from New York City to Brockton. I had flown from Houston to New York, but having time to spare until I matriculated, I chose a more leisurely route to New England proper. Our ship, the S.S. Paludament, was an old but serviceable midsize freighter that transported sundry machine parts in the final stretch of their passage from the industrial heartland north and east to the rural hinterlands of New England and carried passengers as space permitted; I smiled at the thought that much of our cargo had come along the same route I ... [ more ]


17. Review of New Approaches to Hedging—Ronald Rona-Ramalita (3 visits)

Review of New Approaches to Hedging . Review by Ronald Rona-Ramalita, University of Upper Uppsala, Utah. Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch, and Stefan Schneider, eds. 2010. New Approaches to Hedging. Brill. New Approaches to Hedging (NAH) is sort of a rather longish book, about 328 pages more or less. Well, maybe that’s kind of short as academic books run, now that I think about it. The authors (or maybe it’s the editors) make a tolerable lot of claims, some of which I didn’t totally understand, but at least I did read all of them, I think. I mean, it’s possible that I zoned out and missed a claim or two here and there, but I’m pretty sure I read ... [ more ]


18. Effolk Dialect—Jimmypedia (3 visits)

Effolk dialect. From Jimmypedia, the encyclopedia that you ought to pay for, ya cheapskates The Effolk dialect ( /ˈɛfək/, though other stress patterns are common) is a dialect supposedly spoken in the region of Effolk, if it exists. While rarely attested in modern times, some words and phrases of the dialect are reported by the survivors of interactions with the Effolkers. Distribution. The Effolk dialect is spoken in Far East Anglia, a subregion of Doggerland, the latter named for a traditional activity enjoyed by Effolkers. The European Geographical Society does not recognize the existence of Far East Anglia, as decided in their 2019 meeting in Bielefeld, Germany, whose existence they also do not ... [ more ]


19. On Apparent “Systematic Suppletion” in Ksotre—Angus Æ. Balderdash, Esq. and Julienne Autolycus, Ph.D. (3 visits)

On Apparent “Systematic Suppletion” in Ksotre. by Angus Æ. Balderdash, Esq. and, Julienne Autolycus, Ph.D. Open Universe Open University, Jupiter City, Tvashtar Paterae, Io. As noted in Muddybanks (2007), not much is known of Ksotre in the English-speaking world, with Snodgrass (2001) being the previous (fairly low) height of academic interest. We appreciate Muddybanks’ willingness to reduce himself to a merely documentary linguistic approach in the face of the apparently unanalyzable and incomprehensible (but nonetheless intriguing) data. Muddybanks closes his survey with this (obviously sincere) appeal: In the opinion of the author, further research is required into the nature of the ... [ more ]


20. Increasing Linguistic Self-Referentiality in Weird Ways—Γραμματο-Χαοτικον (3 visits)

Increasing Linguistic Self-Referentiality in Weird Ways. Γραμματο-Χαοτικον. As part of our ongoing mission to make the world of language a lot more interesting, we want to encourage our members—and the general language-using public—to increase the unusual self-referentiality of language. As an illustration, the word weird is a little weird, because it doesn’t follow the i-before-e rule.* We propose that, for example, out of whack and wacky should be made slightly out of whack and slightly wacky, respectively, by pronouncing them with the opposite ... [ more ]


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Last updated Feb. 20, 2026.