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 ]

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 ]

A Student’s Guide to the History of Linguistics, Based on Example Sentences. Franz Neumayer. The following sentences exemplify important concepts in linguistics, and relate them to the linguists whose names are most associated with their development. They are provided as a service to MA students reviewing for comprehensive exams. If you do not understand how each sentence exemplifies its concept, or why these particular names are included, you need to re-read the relevant articles. This list will be expanded in future years. Readers are invited to submit additional examples. Accessibility Hierarchy Keenan and Comrie are the people by whom the accessibility hierarchy was described. Bloomfieldian Linguistics ... [ more ]

The Scrabble Cheaters’ Dictionary. provided as a service to our readers, by Speculative Grammarian. Have you ever backed yourself into a corner, lexicographically speaking—while playing Scrabble, or chatting around the water cooler at work, or telling tall tales at the pub? The story is an unfortunate but familiar one: a linguist, polyglot, or other linguaphile finds themselves in the heady position of declaiming to the untutored masses on the subject of a particular word, only to realize that perhaps they’ve over-reached, and no such word exists. A standard fallback position in such a situation is to claim certainty that the word in question—while the details may ... [ more ]

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. Retractions, Rejections and Reconstructions: The Multiply Integrated Lives of Linguistics Texts by Speculative Grammarian Retextualization Editor Reid Rafft Published 2025. 2,328 pages When it comes to texts ... [ more ]

Variation in the English Indefinite Article. The problem of variation in the English indefinite article between the forms a and an has long vexed linguists. In his 1933 classic, Language, Bloomfield cited this case as an example of free variation at the morphological level, saying, “There seems to be no principled basis for predicting which form occurs in which contexts.” This solution was accepted by the neo-Bloomfieldians in general. It was Jespersen who first questioned the Bloomfieldian solution. In 1941, he proposed that the syntactic class of the following word determined the form of the indefinite article; specifically, an occurred before adjectives, and a before nouns. He ... [ more ]

Linguistic Cocktails Prepared and extensively taste-tested, by the SpecGram Mixologists. Interest in cocktails has had a resurgence lately, with people trying new combinations and reviving forgotten blends. We shouldn’t forget the long history the grand subfield of Mixological Linguistics has. Below is a mix of old favorites and new delights. The Newmeyer 1 martini, dry, with olive 1 gin and tonic ... Disparage the martini vigorously for ten to twenty years, arguing that no real establishment should serve it. Urge everyone to drink gin and tonic (“the one true cocktail”) instead. Redefine “gin and tonic” so that it can refer to lots of things other than a cocktail that has gin in ... [ more ]

Fables of Linguistics, The Story of the Weak Vowels. The Tale Teller of Tollerton Town. Whose is that voice in the distance, singing? The Tale Teller of Tollerton Town! But it’s more of a growl than a clear tone ringing— Though admittedly he’s been up dale (and then down). He’s been telling tales since before the beginning, Though he makes it all up and he can’t really spell— And most of his Tales deserve a good binning. But he’s here now! I wonder what Tale he will Tell. Once upon a time in Vowel Town, a wide-open space next door to the busy, noisy, clucking and clicking of Consonant City, there lived a happy community of vowels. Some were quite open and were unafraid to discuss ... [ more ]

A Love/Hate Relationship: Pesky Antonyms. Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University. When students get to college, the majority of them have never thought about antonyms as being anything more than “opposites.” So big is the opposite of small, just like buyer is the opposite of seller. Then, all of a sudden, students are forced into a linguistics course with a professor who tells them that they have to learn to differentiate among different types of antonyms. Student’s minds are nearly exploding with information as they have to learn definitions of terms like ‘converse’ and ‘gradable’ and ‘complementary’ in the world of ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian CLASSIFIEDS FOR SALE ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ FIRE SALE!, EVERYTHING IN THIS, STORAGE UNIT MUST GO!, Poulsen Telegraphones (2), Kay Sona-Graph DSP 5500, Electro Voice 630 V2 microphones (3); IBM 5100 Personal Computer; Eugene Dietzgen Company Improved Mannheim Simplex Slide Rules (4), XT Uzi/Reel-to-Reel Recorders (3); Miscellaneous logarithm tables and nomographs of various vintages. PRICES NEGOTIABLE. NO NARCS!, Contact UGOLINO, SG Box 5668. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ For sale, common sense theories, never used. Contact Wm. Jones, SG Box 9–28. For sale, 47 lightly used sets ... [ more ]

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 ]

Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are They Ever!. by, April May June, Freshman in Elementary Education, Indiana University at Bloomington. It is — "Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — well-known from my L103 class that Turkish and Amharic supposedly aren't related, though it is no longer clear which languages they are related to. However, I have found lots of words in the two languages which sound alike and mean the same thing in only two months of hearing them spoken in two local restaurants. The similarities first caught my attention during an argument at the Turkish restaurant in which the owner kept saying "sought." ... [ more ]

A Primer in, SF Xenolinguistics. - eep opp ork ah-ah -, Justin B. Rye. — - ash nazg durbatulûk -, Table of Contents. Fantasy Exotic Tongues—An Introduction, Let’s Speak Alien—In Ten Easy Lessons, The Unspeakable—And The Unthinkable, Universal Translators—A Buyer’s Guide, CETI for Beginners—Little Green Manuals — - borag thungg -, FANTASY EXOTIC TONGUES—An Introduction. If you’ve reached the online version of this article chasing the search-string “ +fantasy +exotic +tongues ” then I’m afraid you’ve probably come to ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXXIII, Number 2 Brought to you by... Occam’s Safety Razor™ ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Senior Editor; Jonathan Downie, Contributing Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Mark Mandel; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Emily Davis, Vincent Fish, Deak Kirkham, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Samuel Andersson, Florian Breit, Chris Brew, Bethany Carlson, Tuuli Mustasydän, Mary Shapiro; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Suppositio Confusa Tantum for Almost Everyone!; December 2018 ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Youth Research Focus is proud to bring you the finest language-related research by the world’s school-aged youth. Teaching Linguistics in High School. Sven Slater and Ollie Bickford, J.R. Nelson, Jr. High School, St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Introduction. We were required to do an experiment for this year’s High School Science Fair. Our teacher didn’t seem to have any good suggestions for topics, so we called up our old 5^th Grade teacher Mr. Olson and asked him if he had any suggestions. He said that linguists have been trying to develop a curriculum for teaching Linguistics in High Schools, and that they probably would appreciate having some ... [ more ]

Speech is an Elaborate Cover for Widespread Telepathy. Will Styler, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vowels. Abstract. This article challenges the long-standing “Speech” theory of language: that humans communicate by flapping around bits of meat in their heads and necks, thus creating minute and highly speaker-specific patterns of vibration in air pressure, and then interpreting these vibrations, via little bones and tiny hair cells, as referent to concepts, entities, and propositions in the greater world. In place of this overly-complex and increasingly implausible theory, the author proposes a far simpler species-wide telepathic link, with “speech” serving primarily ... [ more ]

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 ]

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