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1. Archives (7 visits)

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 ]


2. Vol CLXV, No 4 (4 visits)

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 ]


3. Podcast—Don’t Baby That Baby, Baby (4 visits)

Don’t Baby That Baby, Baby; by Butch McBastard; From Volume CLXVIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; October 2013 — Despite the attempts by those who study the phenomenon to dress it up in jargon (“caretaker speech”), cutesiness (“motherese”), or TLAs (IDS/CDS—“infant-/child-directed speech”), baby talk is still baby talk, and frankly as a linguist I’m insulted that you think I’d fall for that kind of whitewashing of such a despicable practice. That’s right, I said it, baby talk is despicable. (Read by Trey Jones.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]


4. Vol CXCV, No 2 (4 visits)

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 ]


5. Just Friend?—Helga Langenase & R. Lola Rennt (4 visits)

Just Friend?. Helga Langenase & R. Lola Rennt, Universität zu Ausland. “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a separate word like me?” —The Possessive Cat-Dolls’ Criticizing or, in our overly sensitive times, merely even pointing out that there is some residual sexism inherent in various European languages has very much fallen out of favor among practitioners of linguistics and language science since the advent of the Political Correctness movement in the 1980’s (see Sharpe 2008 for recent, potentially disturbing developments in international policy concerning linguistic castigation on politically correct grounds). Early pioneers in the field ... [ more ]


6. The Origin of the Modern Pronunciation of “Tea”—H.D. Onesimus (3 visits)

The Origin of the Modern Pronunciation of “Tea”. H.D. Onesimus. The etymology of the word ‘tea’ has been the subject of fierce debate since the dawn of British philology. Tea already had an approximation of its modern phonetic value when it came to Europe in the 16th Century, via Portuguese import, but it is well known that the character 茶 was pronounced [thu] in classical Chinese. The circumstances of the change in vowel quality have never been fully explained—a problem this article will remedy. During China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), the indispensability of cavalry units in contemporary warfare gradually became clear to the emperors. Unfortunately, ... [ more ]


7. Letters to the Editor (CLXV.4) (3 visits)

Letters to the Editor. Dear Editor, At our last department colloquium, the speaker used the term “grammicious.” We have been talking about nothing else in the department lounge for three weeks, and we are equally divided. Half of us believe that “grammicious” is correct, but the other half believe the proper term is “grammicitous.” Can you please tell us who is right? Sergio Sergius Nguyen-Carmichael McGill, Free University of North-Central Kazakstan — Dear Serge, You’re all wrong. Both grammicious and grammicitous have positive connotations, being built via analogy from delicious and felicitous, respectively. Unfortunately, the root of both terms, ... [ more ]


8. A Primer in SF Xenolinguistics—Justin B. Rye (3 visits)

A Primer in, SF Xenolinguistics. - eep opp ork ah-ah -, Justin B. Rye. — - ash nazg durbatulûk -, Table of Contents. Fantasy Exotic Tongues—An Introduction, Let’s Speak Alien—In Ten Easy Lessons, The Unspeakable—And The Unthinkable, Universal Translators—A Buyer’s Guide, CETI for Beginners—Little Green Manuals — - borag thungg -, FANTASY EXOTIC TONGUES—An Introduction. If you’ve reached the online version of this article chasing the search-string “ +fantasy +exotic +tongues ” then I’m afraid you’ve probably come to ... [ more ]


9. Naming Practices Among the vonWilliamsXerxesYoyoZyzygyville Elite—Helgi von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets & Claudette von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets (3 visits)

Naming Practices Among the, von­Williams­Xerxes­Yoyo­Zyzygyville Elite. Helgi von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets &, Claudette von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets, Independent Scholars. Around 300 years ago a small town in southern Europe was founded by an onomastically gifted robber baron named, improbably, Alexander Boberto Carolingian Dante Ebcdic Filippo Gustavo Heinrich Ignacio Joseph Ke7en Lucifer Modulus Nigel Odzilla Pascal Quim Roberto Susan Trois Ulysses von Williams-Xerxes-Yoyo-Zyzygy. The capricious von Williams-Xerxes-Yoyo-Zyzygy (hereafter, vWXYZ) had built his fortune selling resurrectionist franchises under the brand name Die Qwikersnätschen, and ... [ more ]


10. It Is Interesting to Note: Best Practices for Scholarly Writing in All Disciplines—Gabriel Lanyi (3 visits)

It Is Interesting to Note: Best Practices for Scholarly Writing in All Disciplines. Gabriel Lanyi*. Abstract Emoticons were designed to express in one glyph a rich cognitive-emotional reaction at a time when readers’ span of attention is approaching epsilon. Since the style guides of most scholarly journals do not recommend the use of emoticons, researchers were induced to develop new modes of expression to promptly convey complex scientific data to the busy reader. The best practices reveal some of the more productive techniques emerging in the literature. * * *. With the exponential growth in scholarship, there are now more articles in every field than hours in the lives of their ... [ more ]


11. Letters to the Editor (CLIV.2) (3 visits)

Letters to the Editor. To: Editor, SpecGram, From: CIA Threat Assessment Division, Re: Hazardous Dumpling Metaphors [CONFIDENTIAL], Dear Editor: Please keep this correspondence confidential, for reasons that we will detail below. We realize that this will probably come as quite a surprise to you, but CIA, under the direction of several of its head chefs, has for a number of years monitored telephone and internet correspondence in order to protect against certain cuisine-related national security threats. One of these (and we realize that is doubtless even more surprising) involves manipulations of complex dumpling topography, or ComDuT, as it is known. Eight years ago, a brilliant but rather unstable topographic ... [ more ]


12. How to Speak to Foreigners—An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the ʔɪɯnkʈlɳɪɞʃt—Claude Searsplainpockets & Helga von Helganschtein y Searsplainpockets (3 visits)

Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another irregular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. How to Speak to Foreigners. An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the ʔɪɯnkʈlɳɪɞʃt 0. Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 66, A Surprising Introduction. In our recent travels to South America, we came across an interesting band of indigenes living in Cayenne, the capital of Guyane. The language they speak, ʔɪɯnkʈlɳɪɞʃt, is also quite interesting. Our first introduction to ... [ more ] Book!


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Last updated Feb. 4, 2026.