SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 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 ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CXCV, Number 3; February 2026, C HIEF C AT H ERDER &, A RBITER OF THE L AST W ORD, Trey Jones, O RDER OF THE, S PECULATIVE P SAMMETICOI, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, Tim Pulju, Bill Spruiell, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXCV, No 3, H EAD OF L EARNING, L INGUISTICS T HROUGH, S ATIRE AND P UNS, Jonathan Downie, S YNTACTICO- P OET &, U NDER- E DITOR OF, U NDER- E DITING, Deak Kirkham, S ENIOR P UZZLING, T EST P ILOT, Vincent Fish, K EEPER OF THE, E DITORIAL T EA C ADDY, Pete Bleackley, A SSOCIATE D EPUTY, A SSISTANT S UB- M ANAGER, OF S ATIRICAL S UCCESS, Luca Dinu, O RTHOGRAPHER- A T- L ARGE, Daniel Swanson, D ILETTANTE E MERITUS, Tel ... [ more ]

Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, BOOKS, SERIES, and MORE The following valuable volumes, spectacular series, and interesting items have been released with pride by Psammeticus Press, an academic publishing house founded in honor of the first and purest of linguistic inquirers: one might criticize his methods, but who could quibble with his results? Follow the links below to learn more about these fabulous books and excellent series, each destined to become a classic in the field. Warehouse Moving Sale We’ve lost the lease on our warehouse and anything we can’t sell we have to move—or rent interns from Speculative Grammarian to do it—and that’s expensive! Help us out and buy a ... [ 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 ]

Palindromic Passivization. Overcoming the Computational Cost of, So-Called “Center-Embedding” Passives. Albrecht Brechtal, Fortuna de Sadamente, and Jonathan van der Meer, Co-Vice-Presidentials of Biolinguisticity at the, Autonomous Xenobiological Linguistics Entity (AXLE). [Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in the long-running “Center Embedding” saga that has unfolded in the pages of Speculative Grammarian. We believe that Brechtal, de Sadamente, and van der Meer have given the definitive analysis of this phenomenon. On the off chance that we are mistaken, future submissions on this topic will likely be referred to Linguistica ad nauseam, Linguistica ad ... [ 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 ]

A Love/Hate Relationship: Pesky Antonyms. Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University. When students get to college, the majority of them have never thought about antonyms as being anything more than “opposites.” So big is the opposite of small, just like buyer is the opposite of seller. Then, all of a sudden, students are forced into a linguistics course with a professor who tells them that they have to learn to differentiate among different types of antonyms. Student’s minds are nearly exploding with information as they have to learn definitions of terms like ‘converse’ and ‘gradable’ and ‘complementary’ in the world of ... [ more ]

The Original Language of Winnie-the-Pooh. Aureliano Buendía, Universidad de Macondo. The text known in English as Winnie-the-Pooh occurs in dozens of different languages. Scholars have long debated the question of what was the original language of composition. One of the most popular hypotheses has been that the original text was written in English. The present paper will use textual evidence to demonstrate the impossibility of that hypothesis and to suggest a more likely candidate. Consider the following lines from the beginning of Chapter I in the English-language version. (1) ...here he is...ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh. When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to ... [ more ]

Dimensional Feature Analysis of English Prepositions. CJ Quines. The missing preposition. Consider the three English prepositions in, on, and at. When we use these as spatial prepositions, we use them for referring to being located in a three-dimensional container, on a two-dimensional surface, or at a zero-dimensional point, respectively: The horse sleeps in the stable. The apple is on the table. Brian stood at the origin of the Cartesian plane. Missing from this paradigm is a preposition corresponding to one-dimensional locations. At first glance, we might believe that this function is also served by the preposition on, as in ... [ more ]

A Venery of Terms— Part I, Collective Nouns for Linguists. X. Altaysh & Uvlarr Ksss, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. Of course one may refer to a group of linguists as “a group of linguists” but then one clearly misses out on the subtle distinctions between kinds of linguists, and the generic joy of collective nouns—a topic in which humans take all too keen an interest. Gaggle is probably never entirely amiss when referring to an excess of linguists (generally held by civilized folk as more than three in any one location; perhaps four if the host is generous and the ventilation is adequate). Finer distinctions and greater euphony are to be had with ... [ more ]

The C-Rhyme and Pun-ish-ment of St. Alvin. by Jerry Fyodor & Josef Dobrovskýevsky. It is now commonly accepted that St. Alvin was always accompanied by an assistant called Theodorus. Theodorus was a budding philosopher, with interests in Kant, Hegel and innateness in generative grammar. He was however, very rotund and was therefore known as the Deep Fat Friar. As a young monk, St Alvin left his first monastery, where he had taken a vow of silence, to found an order that believed that people were best served by creating attractive paper to put around Christmas gifts. It is for this reason that his autobiography was entitled “From Trappist to Wrappist.” The members of that order were noted for their ... [ more ]

On the Proto-Indo-European Origin of ‘Twerk’. Mark Butcher & Mark Candlestick-Maker, Department of PIE Studies, Pecan University. A common question asked of linguists these days, to our collective dismay, is “What is the etymology of ‘twerk’?”¹ Twerking is a dance craze with respectable origins in the New Orleans bounce music scene,² but it has enraged millions in recent years for reasons we would rather avoid writing about. Several authors have speculated that the term is a clipping of ‘footwork’ or a portmanteau of ‘twist’ and ‘jerk’³ (foolish speculation, we know). We will make the case that the word is of ... [ 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 ]

On Revising And Extending Wh-Movement. D. Terence Nuclear, Institute for Advanced Study, in Strangeness. I assume here familiarity with Chomsky (1977), and the entire literature, published and unpublished, written and unwritten, upon which it is based. Chomsky has been criticized, unfairly in my opinion, for attempting to reduce all of grammar to wh-movement. Rather, if he is open to criticism at all, it is because he has failed to appreciate how wide the domain of wh-movement really is. In his paper, Chomsky lists the following general characteristics of wh-movement. 1. It leaves a gap. 2. Where there is a bridge, there is an apparent violation of subjacency, PIC, and SSC. 3. It observes CPNC. 4. ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLVI, Number 3; May 2009, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLVI, No 3, CONSULTING EDITORS, Ken Miner, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jouni Maho, Daniela Müller, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Yahya Abdal-Aziz, James Crippen, Misty A. Smith, James Stanford, Jörg Wenck, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kean Kaufmann, Joey Whitford, z₀ = c; z_n+1 = z_n² + c, OUR NEW ANIMAL O, VERLORDS?, Azy, Rico, N’kisi, Panpanzee, Koko, Alex, Loulis, ... [ more ]

Language Death by Speaker Rejection— A Few Case Studies. by William Carlos Williams Carloses Williamses, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. Much recent work has focused on the death of languages worldwide. Such sad events are almost invariably attributed to a conscious decision by the speaking population to reject their language in favor of some more prestigious tongue, often in pursuit of the opportunities for education and economic advancement that the prestigious language seems to offer. In this paper, I will employ several case studies to show that another mechanism is often at work in language death: namely, that some languages reject their speakers, rather than the other way around. That ... [ more ]

On the Correct Usage of the Ellipsis; by Darius D. Dolesworthy, Otis Oswald Ott, and T. Thadeus Theotokopoulis; From Volume CLX, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; November 2010 — It has come to our attention that there are certain individuals associated with this otherwise reputable journal that appear to be ignorant of the rules regarding the proper usage of the ellipsis. In their ignorance they have proposed what they call a “⅔ Ellipsis” as a way of saving on printing costs. It is this proposition with which we at the BIGRAC must take issue. (Read by James Campbell.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

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