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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, 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 ]

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 ]

Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor. Once again our long-time colleague and comrade/editor-in-arms Mikael Thompson has provided some high-quality summer reading material (and in this case a novel’s worth of quantity, to boot) for the discriminating fan of linguistic themed fiction. Strangecraft is a slow-burning weird tale, a detailed, personal story told against a stygian, cosmic-scale backdrop. The narrator wends his way through the wilds of post-Subsidence New England in search of an advanced degree in linguistics, but both he and the reader find considerably more than they bargained for in and around the environs of the Miskatonic Institute of Technology, as numerous ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective. Are you in a world of linguistic hurt? The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective (SLAC) will offer you empirical, empathic, emphatic advice you can use!^* Remember, if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, then you don’t need advice! So, if you need advice, trust us—and cut yourself some SLAC! ... Dear SLAC, Thanks ever so for the recent advice column on focus. All this while I’ve been pluralising it as feces (pron: [fekes]) on analogy with man~men and ox~oxen. Anyway, as a health conscious diner with an obsession for half-rhymes, the column got me thinking: ... [ more ]

Strangecraft. by Mikael Thompson. ... - I -, Ruffles and Blood. A copy of the book on a table It is perhaps best to begin my chronicle as I stood on the deck of the freighter taking me from New York City to Brockton. I had flown from Houston to New York, but having time to spare until I matriculated, I chose a more leisurely route to New England proper. Our ship, the S.S. Paludament, was an old but serviceable midsize freighter that transported sundry machine parts in the final stretch of their passage from the industrial heartland north and east to the rural hinterlands of New England and carried passengers as space permitted; I smiled at the thought that much of our cargo had come along the same route I ... [ more ]

The /bɪɡɪnɪŋ/ of the /ɛnd/, A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. Automagically Transcribed℠ by the, LingTechCo Dictaphonemizer 3.1™. T.J.: (yelling) Mr. Ó McBar van der Fitzez del Abבןsønовичόπουλescu ǃ Mr. Ó McBar van der Fitzez del Abבןsønовичόπουλescu ǃ I can’t figure out how to get this new-fangled Dictaphonemizer to turn on. I already wrangled a one-month extension and I still don’t have anything for my editorial, which ... [ more ]

New speech disorder linguists contracted discovered!. An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our correspondent visited was affected by has appeared. Those affected our correspondent a local grad student called could hardly understand apparently still speak fluently. The cause experts the LSA sent investigate remains elusive. Frighteningly, linguists linguists linguists sent examined are highly contagious. Physicians neurologists psychologists other linguists called for help called for help called for help didn’t help either. The disorder experts reporters SpecGram sent consulted investigated apparently is a case of pathological center embedding. Yreka Bakery (Egello College). ... [ more ]

Greek Particles. Two facts well-known to linguists for many years are that Ancient Greek orthography represented speech much more closely than does modern English orthography, or practically any other modern European orthography, and that speech, unlike writing, is full of hesitations, false starts, and meaningless expletive utterances which are not recorded in writing. For instance, In English, a typical spoken text might be: Well, it’s the, umm... you know, the one that, uh, you got from the store across the street. We can make a number of interesting observations about the meaningless expletives in the above and in similar texts, of which the interested reader can collect many more examples, if he is so inclined. The ... [ more ]

Systematic Suppletion: An Investigation of Ksotre Case Marking. By Lawrence R. Muddybanks, Ph.D.. Introduction Little research has been done on the Ksotre language of northern Lithuania, and that which has been done has been rather unenlightening.¹ The present paper aims to not only expand the body of research on the Ksotre language, but also to introduce a phenomenon found, thus far, in no other natural language on Earth. Without further ado, then, I present the case marking system of Ksotre. Case in Ksotre Ksotre has fourteen cases and three numbers, as shown below: Number: singular, dual, plural Grammatical Cases: nominative, accusative, partitive, genitive, dative, instrumental, Мој ... [ more ]

Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, Chiasmus of the Month Awards ... This somewhat irregular award is a sign of our recognition of and deep appreciation for the authors’ contribution to the upholding of decent writing standards in academic literature and to the dissemination of the finest of speech figures. Winners are selected for ~~each~~ ~~most~~ many issues by our Chiastic Editor and Editorial Chiasturge. The honorees to date are listed below. Chiasmus of the Month; November 2025, Todd Copeland, 2024, “A Figure of Speech and a Speechless Figure: Determinations of Identity in George Sand’s Indiana and Edith Wharton’s The House of ... [ more ]

*u̯erg̑- u̯erg̑- u̯erg̑-: Aspects of Indo-European Popular Culture. Joe R. G. d’Umezzille. The study of Proto-Indo-European culture dates back almost as long as the study of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. It is primarily conducted by trying to identify etymologically related phrasings and stories in various distinct daughter traditions. One of the greatest achievements in this field was undoubtedly Calvert Watkins’s discovery that the PIE phrase *(e-)g^u̯hen-t og^u̯him ‘he killed the serpent’ was at the basis of a very important dragon-slaying myth, and that reflexes of this ... [ more ]

Saussure and Bloomfield: The Question of Influence. One of the more vexed questions in modern linguistic historiography concerns the extent of Saussure’s influence on Bloomfield and through him on American structuralism as a whole. Rather than add to the discussion of that issue, I intend in this paper to point out the importance of another, related, but hitherto ignored question, to wit, what was the extent of Bloomfield’s influence on Saussure? Now, before you start leaping all over me, calling me an idiot and calling my question absurd, let me state that I am well-aware that Saussure died in 1913, before Bloomfield had published his 1914 An Introduction to the Study of Language. Let me further state that I ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT 50 Schwas of Vowel. SpecGram Press Me Against You brings you a sizzling, schwizzling story of passion in the articulatory phonetics lab. Sche was a brilliant billionaire businesswoman; he was an early career articulatory phonetician with a massive student debt and a schmouldering passion for unstressed mid-central vowels. Sche schmoozed him; he was schmitten. They schwaltzed schwowly across the tile floor of the articulatory phonetics laboratory. Sche held him close and schwhispered, ‘Have you ever been schwacked on the behind with a schwhip? That’ll make you articulate some vowels!’ ‘Schwow me!’ he schwaid, schwivering with anticipation ... and they kissed: ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIV, Number 1 Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Vincent Fish; Associate Editors: Luca Dinu, Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Emily Davis, Andrew Lamont, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks, Nina Sloan; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; Greek Loves Plural Formations Like God Loves Beetles; July 2024, ... [ more ]

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