SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 ]

Speculative Grammarian and SpecGram.com. Our Story. The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields. SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while ... [ more ]

How to Pay for Linguistic Fieldwork. by the SpecGram Editorial Board. The thing is is that fieldwork is expensive, and yet we have to somehow pay for it. Or we won’t get to do it. And really, heaven help the poor soul who can’t pay for a trip even to Tahiti, and has to try to come up with some topic on English syntax that hasn’t already been beaten like a dead metaphor. At SpecGram, our interest is is to help people in this kind of situation. So, in the interest of new data (or, should we say, in the interest of no more old English data), and out of a sense of selfless devotion to the betterment of Ph.D. students all across Linguistica, the SpecGram editorial board has pulled together ... [ 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 ]

SpecGram, Quarterly. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. [Note: Due to a scheduling error⁰ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

L’Ishing du Gwujlang VIII—Lusrveer. by Dorothea Dorfman and Theodora Mundorf, with additional assistance from Bob Kinnick and Dee Reed. Focused readers will by now have familiarized themselves with l’ishing from our prior groundwork (SpecGram CLXXVI.1, etc.). Though giving the impression of being parallel to French verlan, l’ishing interchanges words that can be made to correspond to one another. In earlier installments we have inspected dialects of l’ishing that are based on moving sounds or letters from one end of a word to the other. We have recently chanced on another novel dialect, called lusrveer, in which paired words are each the phonetic ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXVII, Number 2 ... 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: Pete Bleackley, Florian Breit, Jonathan Downie, T.B. Geller, Adam Graham, Daniela Müller, David J. Peterson, Callum Robson; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Data is Optional; May 2013 ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

How to Use the Comparative Method for Fun and Profit, Al Tayo-Nostradamus, Esq.. The comparative method is one of the most powerful tools ever developed by historical linguists. With the comparative method, you can take any two languages, determine whether they are related, and reconstruct their common ancestor, thus incontrovertibly cementing your reputation as the discoverer of the Italo-Turkic language family. But enough about me. The point is, the comparative method can—besides helping you further your scientific goals, as well as your academic and professional goals (which may or may not overlap with your scientific goals)—elevate you above the masses and make you one of the linguist ... [ more ]

Linguimericks, Book १०१. Well, well, Father Christmas! I pause To realise that you, of course, Have a father and mother Maybe sister and brother Which I note in a relative Claus —Stu King-Filler, 1066 Brown the waters; brown the rising prows; Grey the water; grey the angry skies; And grey the land around which heaves and sighs As Harald’s hard and hardy army rows. Still the silent waters as the bows Of Norway’s ships cut through the thick dark flows, Drawing the two Kings closer; neither knows What futures fall—or who will win, or how. He comes. And comes with stark words from the north, Distant cousins to another speech Long-settled in this land which now must reach ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXVIII, Number 2 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Bill Spruiell, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Adam Baker, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Robin Day, Siva Kalyan, Kean Kaufmann, Andrew Lamont, Carin Marais, Tel Monks, Mary Shapiro, Adham Smart, Kien-Wei Tseng, Don Unger; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Improved Razzle (Similar Dazzle); February 2017 ... [ more ]

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