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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 ]

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 ]

A Morphosyntactic, Semantic, Pragmatic, Sociolinguistic and Literary Investigation into the Psycholinguistic Mechanisms Underlying English Puns. Pete Bleackley, Associate Editor. On her website Lang 101¹ my highly steamed^{2, 3} editorial colleague Madalena Cruz-Ferreira prompts: Try now to think about jokes involving structural ambiguity (morphological structure, syntactic form or syntactic function). As before, explain the source of the humour, in an unambiguous manner! While the answer I gave on her website correctly explained the structural ambiguity present in the joke, it was far from an exhaustive analysis of the source of the humour. I here expand on it to present a more ... [ more ]

Académie Française Has Banned Conlanging, Again. SpecGram Wire Services. Paris, France—Today marked the 85th consecutive year in which l’Académie française has banned conlanging. The convened panel of Immortals (as members are officially known) passed the measure, a terse 400 words in French (or 70 in its English translation) in a twelve minute discussion that opened with the reading of a passage reminding everyone that the Immortals’ resplendent green uniforms were adopted specifically to denote the military spirit needed for “The War on Conlanging.” Critics of the move have lambasted l’Académie. One detractor, speaking on condition of ... [ more ]

PAID ADVERTISEMENT — http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress New from Panini Press! . Word Problems for Linguists ❦पा by Barbara Millicent Roberts, Ph.D. Department of Applied Mathematical Linguistics Handler University Published 2025. 194 pg. Linguists! You’ve spent years dissecting syntax trees, contemplating the very origin of language itself, and arguing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Voynich manuscript with clueless neckbeards online—safe in the knowledge that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill—and if you have tenure, you don’t even have to do ... [ more ]

Twenty Special Forms of Rhetoric. Rhetoric has been a topic of academic interest for, approximately, forever. Below are detailed a number of special types of rhetorical argument, some of which (eg, (3)) have been observed since the time of Aristotle [Aristotle] and before. Others (eg, (1)) have been clearly recognized only within the last century [eg, Davis and Hersh]. Some of these (eg, (2)) have never been explicitly delineated before. The uses of rhetoric are manifold and many explications of such have been made before, which this paper will not repeat. Proof by Intimidation, A: What do you think about objection X?, B: That's silly!, Proof by Loudness, A: What do you think about objection X?, B: That's VERY ... [ more ]

What is Linguistics Good For, Anyway?. An Advice Column by Jonathan “Crazy Ivan” van der Meer. The most commonly asked question of a linguist, when one’s secret is revealed, is (all together now!): “How many languages do you speak?” I’ve decided that a good answer to this question is π. More than three, less than four—though if you discover that your interlocutor is singularly unsophisticated or otherwise from Kansas, you can call it three to keep things simple. A less commonly asked, but almost certainly as frequently considered questions is, “So, what is linguistics good for, anyway?” That one is harder to answer—at least if you ... [ more ]

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 ]

St. Uvula’s College, Cambridge, 1917. Lady Fantod reacts as the most tedious student in her Old Norse seminar self-selects again. Extract from an Interview with Eglantine Lady Fantod, Dowager Professor of Philology at Cambridge University. Eglantine Lady Fantod, the legendary raconteuse and grande dame of Golden Age linguistics, recalls halcyon days in a series of interviews with Freya Shipley. The full memoir will be published in 2012 by Taradiddle Press, Oxford (8 volumes, price 17p). “Sacks, Sacks, Sacks. That’s all these young sociolinguists ever think of. They simply don’t realise what things were like when I was a girl. “There were nights when no one slept at all ... [ more ]

On the Proto-Indo-European Origin of ‘Twerk’. Mark Butcher & Mark Candlestick-Maker, Department of PIE Studies, Pecan University. A common question asked of linguists these days, to our collective dismay, is “What is the etymology of ‘twerk’?”¹ Twerking is a dance craze with respectable origins in the New Orleans bounce music scene,² but it has enraged millions in recent years for reasons we would rather avoid writing about. Several authors have speculated that the term is a clipping of ‘footwork’ or a portmanteau of ‘twist’ and ‘jerk’³ (foolish speculation, we know). We will make the case that the word is of ... [ more ]

Logical Fallacies for Winning Arguments and Influencing Decisions. by F. “Al” Lacie, Ph.D. Grand Old Party Linguist. Keeping to the approximately quindecennial pattern established by G.R.A.M.M.A.R. 1979 and Seely, 1993, I am pleased to provide a list of common logical fallacies and cognitive biases used in argumentation in the field of Linguistics (and elsewhere). However, it is not my intention to present these logical fallacies (with examples!) so that you, the dear reader, may learn to avoid them, but rather so that you may learn to use them—if they didn’t work at least some of the time, no one would still be making these “errors”. You may also be able to recognize these ... [ more ]

DIS(PLAY)FUL END(GAME)SOMELY. by Maija Meikäläinen, Ph.D. and Matti Meikäläinen, J.D. Takahikiä College, Pippurlandia. These puzzles are worth ¹/₃ point each. Below are a number of word pairs, such that the last letters of the first word overlap with the first letters of the second word, as with DISPLAY and PLAYFUL. The overlapping letters have been replaced with the same number of blanks, which you need to fill in. At least one of the terms in each pair has some relation to language or linguistics. EU(_ ... _)OLE, A(_ ... _ _)OUN, AC(_ ... _ _)ER, ACOU(_ ... _ ... )KLER, AD(_ ... _ _)ATIM, ALPH(_ ... _ _)TED, AS(_ ... _ _)ENCE, ASTE(_ ... _ _)INESS, ... [ more ]

Ask Grammaticality Brown. Q: I want to relocate my Whytree, Whobush and Whatplants (possibly with some Howpansies) to the leftmost part of my garden. Is there a mechanism to do this without them losing integrity or constituency? A: The leftmost part of the garden can be a crowded place! Topicalus focusensis often thrives there and few gardens can consider themselves complete without a focusensis, I’m sure you agree! However, if you carefully lift up the whole plant with all its roots and move it in an iterative stepwise movement, you can usually get it the area of land where you want to site it (or the landing site if you will!). P.S. A word of warning if your garden has, as many of the best gardens ... [ more ]

A More Interesting Observation Than You a Response. Aloysius Vinicius Perle, Assistant Professor of Theoretical Pragmatics, Western Nebraska Community College, Scottsbluff NE. Recently, in the process of perusing a particularly brutal piece of syntactic analysis, we were reliably informed in a footnote that “Pico wrote a more interesting novel than Brio wrote a play” is an eminently asteriskable production—or, rather, non-production, as it supposedly would not be spontaneously produced outside the confines of syntacticians’ offices and insane asylums. Curious that, for not 24 hours earlier we encountered a statement on Facebook, “Everything’s bigger in Texas! Our state has ... [ more ]

On the Speculative Grammarian. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. We are often asked¹ why we don’t use “the” in front of “Speculative Grammarian” in the name of our journal. It’s a noun like any other, after all. Many inquire whether we are against determiners for some reason.², ... The organisers of the conference Quality of Models and Models of Quality,; October 2015, in Stockholm, Sweden. Chiasmus of the Month; May 2015, It’s a perfectly good question. Most of our staff have become so used to the name Speculative Grammarian that we interpret “the Speculative Grammarian” as using “celebrity ... [ more ]

A Time of Unprecedentedly “Unprecedented Times”. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. In these unprecedented times, it is important to not lose our heads; we must remain calm and steadfast in the face of adversity in these unprecedented times, joining together—while maintaining the appropriate social distance in these unprecedented times—for the common good. However, unless the times become even more unprecedented and some virus mutates one of your loved ones into a flesh-eating zombie, or the virus itself grows to the size of a beachball and begins chasing you through your garden,¹ there is no excuse for wildly inaccurate speech,² even in ... [ more ]

Geothermal Influences on Second-Person Clusivity. Pele Vulcan, University of Eyjafjallajökull. Does any language have a clusivity distinction in the second-person pronouns, i.e. a pronoun that specifically means “you and them” as opposed to “you” alone? As discussed by Simon (2005), answers range from “yes, and here are some examples” to “no, and in fact the human mind cannot even handle such a distinction” with a range of shrugs and maybes in between. This, however, is not the question I will be addressing here, but one which has received far less attention: the role of volcanoes in language change. Simon (op. cit.), discussing variation in pronoun forms in the ... [ more ]

A New Mechanism For Contact-Induced Change: Evidence From Maritime Languages. H.D. Onesimus, Gobi Institute of Maritime Linguistics, Lanzhou, China. Modern contact linguistics has demonstrated an impressive ability to account for language change and the emergence of new languages with a remarkably small number of mechanisms: bilingualism, creolization, borrowing, and convergence (also known as “smart drift”). However, a few intractable situations of language contact seemingly cannot be accounted for in terms of this elegant system (notable examples include Wutun, Ma’a and Texas English). In this article, I show how the long-standing problem of Penguin and the Cetacean languages reveals a new type of ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another irregular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. Hunting the Elusive Labio-Nasal. An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Beeg Haan Krrz⁰. Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 57, Introduction The now well-known clicks found in certain African languages must have come as quite a shock to the first European linguists who heard them. Many of the sounds were familiar, of course, but the idea that they could be a component of language had to have been hard to believe. Even now the languages of Africa have secrets to share—note the ... [ more ]

Meeting Regulations for the, International Ambiguity Society/, Société d’Ambigüité Internationale. A meeting will be presided over by the president and the chairperson or the scrimshander. No member may bring motions or call for voting without the express permission of the presiding officer. To comply with standards, meetings will be held in a room with unlockable doors, and members will wear inflammable shoes with untieable laces. The scribe shall submit a summary of all statements made at the end of the meeting. Every member has the right to sit in one chair. All members are not allowed to take personal phone calls during meetings. The presiding officer may only berate members who are absent. The ... [ more ]

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