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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 ]
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 CXCV, Number 2 Penultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham, Vincent Fish; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Luca Dinu; Associate Editors: Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Emily Davis, Gabriel Lanyi, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; All the Noise That’s Fit to Print; November 2025, ... [ 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 ]
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 ] 
Speculative Grammarian Youth Research Focus is proud to bring you the finest language-related research by the world’s school-aged youth. Grey Duck or Goose?, Mapping variation in a children’s game in Minnesota. Fifth Grade Science Fair Project, by Sven Slater and Ollie Bickford, J. O. Nelson Public School, St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Research Question. Last year, a new kid named Tyler P. joined our fourth grade class. Tyler was from Illinois or some other southern state, and she told us that down there kids play “duck, duck, goose,” instead of “duck, duck, grey duck” like we do here in Minnesota. We thought this was strange, even for the South, but then we ... [ more ] 
Cabalistic Element Naming, A Semi-Practical Use for Linguistics. by Ph. Isaacs, N.V. Ph.D. and Hume N. Ih-Tees. We all (or, at least those of us who stayed awake in high school chemistry) are familiar with chemical elements like sodium (atomic number 11, symbol Na ) and chlorine (atomic number 17, symbol Cl ), but most of us (even those of us who failed out of chemistry in college—the pinnacle of science achievement among humanities majors!) are aware of the fascinating world of elements beyond the mere hundred-off substances known today. The International Cabal of Pure and Applied Linguistics has been keeping an eye on the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which uses a set of systematic ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CXC, Number 2 Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Senior Editor; Jonathan Downie, Senior Editor, Pete Bleackley, Contributing Editor, Deak Kirkham, Contributing Editor; Associate Editors: Vincent Fish, Mark Mandel; Assistant Editors: Emily Davis, Luca Dinu, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Andrew Lamont, Tom Patterson, Daniel Swanson; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Complex Sentences With Simple Meanings; May 2021 ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXVIII, Number 4 ... 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; Now with 40% fewer adverbs!; December 2013 ... [ more ]
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 ]
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 ]
Letters to the Editor. Dear Editors, I am aware that SpecGram traces its ultimate origins to 9th-century Iceland. However, so far the editors seem to have been oblivious to SpecGram’s clear connections with the medieval Irish tradition of speculative linguistics, and most especially the Auraicept na n-Éces, which explains, among other things, how Irish is a conlang made out of the best parts of each of the confused tongues after the Tower of Babel incident. So although the editors are probably right in placing the foundation of SpecGram as a journal in 9th-century Iceland, it seems clear to me that it comes out of an older tradition brought there doubtlessly by the travelling Irish ... [ more ]
Letters to the Editor. To the editor(s) whom it may concern: While I take issue with Rhodes’ original Tame/Wild scale, as well as Bangzerrungen’s (aptly labelled) “Wild Extrapolation of Rhodes’ Tame/Wild Scale” I did enjoy Rhodes’ very close transcription of “wild” onomatopoeia as cited by Bangzerrungen. One of the things I love about the IPA is that it is almost a schematic recording of sound—largely as it was intended to be. I was explaining this fact to my (very patient) husband. I worked out [ʔm̰ɨ̰̃ː˥˦˥], and he was impressed—it is better than any cow imitation I’ve ever ... [ more ]
Christmas Carol Orthography Puzzle. by Mary Pearce. I have just finished heading up an orthography course, so orthography is on my mind. Now I need help with the testing of a new orthography proposal for English. All you need to do is read the proposal and then read the titles of the Christmas carols below. Proposal The orthography is produced from the phonetics of the text spoken by a Brit. So that means fewer ‘r’s than you may be used to. (Sorry, no intrusive ‘r’s in these data.), Only letters in the English alphabet are allowed so that means some digraphs and a bit of creativity that I won’t bore you with. (That should cover any typos.), Vowels and glottal stops are too complicated so ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXIX, Number 2 Tenth Digiversary Issue, Presented in association with Panini Press ❦पा, ... 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 Downie, Jouni Maho, Tel Monks, Tuuli Mustasydän, Cathal Peelo, David J. Peterson, Callum Robson, Zac Smith, Tangent Wong, Decennial Editors, Bryan Allen, Aya Katz, Kean Kaufmann, Ken Miner, Daniela Müller, Gabe Olsen, Freya Shipley, Joey Whitford, Are We Tenure Yet?; February 2014 ... [ more ]
Оrthоgraрhіc Perрlехer. Welcome to the Speculative Grammarian Оrthοɡrаphіс Ρerplехеr! This not-quite-pointless little tool will munge your text, randomly replacing some characters with homoglyphs that are nearly identical1—or at least quite reasonably similar to the untrained eye. Why? To make text both very hard and very easy to find via normal search (try to find “οrthoɡrарhіс реrрleхer” on this page, for example); to confuse and amaze your friends and enemies alike;6 to pass the time in a ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXX, Number 1 ... 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, Sophie Elsässer, Rachel Jamison, Katerina Kandylaki, Stephanie Leser, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks, Daniela Müller, Jona Sassenhagen, Lea Schäfer, Zac Smith; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Ernomahterpoeria; May 2014 ... [ more ]
The Cartography of the Derivation: A Brief History of the Louis and Clärque Expedition. by Carlos L. P. Rizziani. This map, the first and most impressive of its kind, is the result of an arduous, unrelenting 40-year expedition across ungovernable expanses, swaths of rich morphology, unaccusative prairies, dangerous constraints, and inhospitable aspectual projections that constitute the known expanses of The Derivation. Prior to this vast undertaking, which cost the lives of more than 28 brave men and women (and at least nine children), efforts to properly govern the peoples of The Derivation were mostly ineffective. The very nature of political borders and binding domains were often in dispute, while secessions of ... [ more ]
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Last updated Jan. 23, 2026.