SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome . Are you looking for a book about ancient Roman history that’s interesting, informative, and amusing? No? Oh. Well, all the same, as long as you’re on this webpage already, we’d like to recommend that you buy Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome. Easy to read, full of genuine historical facts, and adorned with amateurish hand-drawn pictures, The History of Rome is so good that even Girolamo Savonarola might hesitate to cast it into the flames. And best of all, it’s only $6.99! Buy one now! Interested, but wary of being burned by a slick advertising campaign for a product that fails to live up to the hype? Then download the free preview and read ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

Mid. after-Nguyen Knap, A Brief Ontogenical Sketch. by Mandy O. Chyryry, Universidad Subordinada de Asunción. There is a little-known cluster of trade creoles that have sprung up on several islands in the Mid-Atlantic; one of these creoles, used on Ascension Island, in particular presents an interesting case of creolization of a semi-constructed language that even its native speakers cannot speak with true native fluency. When I first began my fieldwork on these creoles, I ran into several obstacles, some familiar to fieldworkers everywhere, some, I think, particular to this culture and language. For reasons I did not initially understand, speakers of Mid. after-Nguyen Knap are particularly ... [ more ]

Strings and Things: A Unificational Meta-Theory for All Linguistics. Trent Slater. Despite the best efforts in those sciences that ignore the importance of morphological historiography,¹ it has so far proved impossible to provide one theory to rule them all. Thus, as head of the largest group of linguistic meta-theoreticians in the Whole World,² I feel that it falls to me to propose and prove a Grand Theory of Everything Linguistic. First, it is necessary to outline the main reasons for the creation of linguistic theories. According to my exhaustive research,³ there are only three rationales that require investigation. Rationale 1: Linguistic theories are invented in the vain hope ... [ more ]

Dictionary of Essential Linguistics Vocabulary, by Crystal Gayle. Reviewed by Jean-Pierre LeBeau, Paris, France. Seldom does a field so young and controversy-fraught as modern linguistics benefit from disciplined research into its synchronic terminology as much as linguistics will from Crystal Gayle’s Dictionary of Essential Linguistics Vocabulary. Students and scholars alike will find Gayle’s work thorough, insightful, careful, and most of all, readable. In compiling her definitions, Gayle has made extensive use of the intuitions of literally hundreds of linguists, obtained through a carefully-crafted questionnaire distributed at the world’s leading universities (except ... [ more ]

It Was a Dark and Stormy Noun... 1986 Edition. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Some of our more, ahem, mature readers may remember that back in the mid-80’s Speculative Grammarian ran an annual Bulwer-Lytton-style contest, asking readers to submit the worst possible opening sentence for a linguistically-themed book. In fact, some of those same readers may have submitted entries, and may still be wondering whether or not they won. Sorry about that. The contest entries were in fact judged by the editorial board, but a dispute between Pulju (a Givónian functionalist) and Slater (a Lasnikian generativist) turned uncivil and the winners were never announced. In the meantime, ... [ more ]

The High Point of Linguistics. by Academic Altitude Editor, I M High, (with the lofty assistance of Hugh Pointe). Everyday life is rich with examples of some things being higher than others. Glossing over the technical difficulties implicated in what ‘being high’ may mean (remember Van der Plopp’s rebuttal of Von Schniezenhoffler’s verticality axis!), it is incontestably empirical that some tall people bang their heads on low beams, sky divers descend towards the earth, Juliet looks down ’pon Romeo in her balcony scene and, perhaps most strikingly, stairs exist. However, the richness and variety of phenomena exemplifying differential altitude in the domain of the physical is more than outweighed ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXII, Number 1 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Bill Spruiell, Senior Editor, Sheri Wells-Jensen, Consulting Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Florian Breit; Editorial Associates: Samuel Andersson, Robert Beard, Bethany Carlson, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks, Laura Ryals, Adham Smart, Zac Smith, Yuval Wigderson; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; F*lk Yeah Etymology!; January 2015 ... [ more ]

I U Linguistics Club. Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. June 1978. ... i u linguistics club, edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, Who is Al? All my life, I fell for the explanation that “al” was just some kind of Latin abbreviation used by scholars too apathetic to learn the names of their collaborators. (It made sense, okay? What else would you expect after years in academia?) However, it was recently brought to my attention that some students believe Al to be a very prolific writer, co-authoring thousands of papers in every discipline imaginable. After consulting with editors of second-rate publications such as Science and The Yale Law Journal, I am only partially convinced by this emerging conspiracy theory, and I am counting on you to provide a definitive answer. Is Al real, or the ... [ more ]

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 ]

Review Article, Carmichael, James Grant III. The Structure of Bee, Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1991.. Truly a breath of fresh air in the recently-stale field of animal communication studies, Carmichael’s book is a pure delight from page one. Apart from his lucidly clear prose and strikingly funny sense of humor, this highly respected author exhibits characteristically lucid analysis and clear formulations of his obviously profound thoughts. Space allows us here to touch on only a few of the books’ many engaging features. Firstly (and certainly not lastly), it is a clear stroke of genius to give the bees in the study individual names. The reader is unconsciously caught up—without ... [ more ]

To the Fools and Sages¹ of April. A Letter from April ~~Associate~~ Executive Editor Mikael Thompson. It is often said that Valentine’s Day is a commercialized monstrosity created by the Frankensteins of the greeting card industry to make a few extra bucks as people celebrate once a year what they should celebrate every day. Similarly, Mother’s Day is a sop to the consciences of unfilial children everywhere, Elvis’s birthday is a one-off observation of the spiritual power in all of us, and Labor Day is inherently contradictory. To which we can only say, Thank Elvis Arbor Day’s just one day a year! By the same token, we at SpecGram abhor the very concept of April ... [ more ]

Most Popular Pages—Today