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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 ]
Regarding wombat. by Tim Pulju, Rice University, Dictionaries of English list the word wombat as being of “native origin”—a reasonable supposition, in view of the native origins of words such as kangaroo and koala, but a supposition which in this instance is clearly incorrect. Consider the following English words and their German counterparts: wombat, Beutelmaus, (flying) bat, Fledermaus, Also note the German word Maus, a reduced form of the earlier (Grund)maus. Obviously, the German morpheme maus can be identified with the English bat. The original meaning of both was ‘any smallish rodentlike critter’. In English, for whatever ... [ more ]
Linguistic Contributions To The Formal Theory Of Big-Game Hunting1. R. Mathiesen, Brown University. The Mathematical Theory of Big-Game Hunting must surely be ranked among the major scientific achievements of the twentieth century. That this is so is largely the work of one man, H. Pétard, in whose fundamental paper (1938) certain recent advances in mathematics and physics were employed with great skill to create a theory of unmatched—not to say unmatchable!—power and elegance. One must not, of course, dismiss Pétard’s predecessors totally out of hand: the field had a long and distinguished history as a technology, was raised to the rank of a science by the ... [ more ] 
Breaking the Fourth Wall and the Fourth Voice. A Letter from the Managing Editor. Well, we don’t actually speak that much Finnish or Estonian around these parts, so we don’t really get a lot of fourth voice action, but boy howdy we do love breaking that fourth wall. Did you notice, Dear Reader? Huh? Didja?, ... Sandro Nielsen, 2013, “The Future of Dictionaries, Dictionaries of the Future” in The Bloomsbury Companion To Lexicography, Bloomsbury Publishing. Chiasmus of the Month; January 2014, Getting back to the use and abuse of voices specifically, and syntax in general, this month’s issue of SpecGram features a wonderful article that continues a long—if ... [ more ]
Handbook for Linguistic Elicitation, Volume 28: Laziness and Inactivity , From the Editors of Psammeticus Press, Published 2013. ... Volume 28 of the Handbook for Linguistic Elicitation focuses on that essential of human nature, laziness. Everybody knows that linguists need to elicit words for activities like “killing,” “breaking” and “eating,” but let’s face it, we can’t stop there. And truth be told, these “highly transitive” verbs just aren’t that important to most actual people. Well, OK, “eating” is important, and people actually do a lot of that, but nobody spends their time killing things or breaking things (except to eat). No. ... [ more ]
This Weekend Only at the Coliseum! , Orthoepic Diaskeuasis, Brought to you by the SpecGram Promotional Board, Produced by Trey Jones and Mikael Thompson, Underwritten by Psammeticus Entertainment Consortium Corp. & Co. Inc. Ltd. ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT THE GRAD STUDENT LEGAL DEFENSE FUND. FREE THE BOUND MORPHEMES! Featuring original band members Kip Arsky on vocals, Bronk Horst on lead guitar, and Pā Ṇini on drums, accompanied by special guests Kāt Yāyana and Ṛg V. Eda. Showcasing songs from the entire Orthoepic Diaskeuasis catalog, including deep cuts from their first album, Aṣṭādhyāyī rare B-Sides from ... [ more ]
SpecGram, Quarterly. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. [Note: Due to a scheduling error 0 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 ]
Welcome to the Empire of Earth™*, Membership Application, Part 17.b, Linguistics, Subsection 4, Appendix II v.2161 (revised 2401, 2619, 2993). Advice for Creating Your Orthography. One of the most overlooked issues that species new to the Empire of Earth™ have to grapple with is their relative lack of standing within the Empire. Contrary to all expectations at the time, humanity solved all of its major issues centuries ago, long before expanding beyond our home planet. There is no hunger, no illness, no war. We cleaned up our infestation of elongated muskrats and deported them all back to their home world of Beta Dweebulon Zero—which has since been quarantined. We seem to have ... [ more ]
BREAKING NEWS Macron to Face Le Pen in French Election. SpecGram Wire Services. The Front National candidate, Marine Le Pen, has reacted to the news that Emmanuel Macron will be her opponent in the final round of the French Presidential election. “Here I will draw the line,” she said. “This Macron, he is not French enough. We have the acute, the grave, the circumflex, the cedilla and the tréma. Surely these are all the diacritics French needs? We must not allow more to come in from other languages.” When asked about Le Pen’s statement, Macron replied, “What France needs now is an accent that leans neither to the left, like the acute, nor to the right, like the grave, ... [ more ]
Prevent Sad Holiday Linguists—Get Them a Copy of The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics . Every holiday season, countless linguists have their celebrations ruined by thoughtless gifts given by clueless loved ones. They say it’s the thought that counts, but we know that’s only true if that thought is accompanied by at least some tiny semblance of awareness of a linguist’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations. We could try to explain those hopes and dreams and aspirations to you—but we’d have to give you a mini course on phonetics, phonology, and voice onset time first. Instead, we can assure you that SpecGram has the right gift for your linguist loved ... [ more ]
/ nuz baɪts /. Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers. Machines Equal Professional Translators. After the disappointment of finding that recent claims that machine translation had reached human translator parity only worked if you used a very loose definition of “human translator” scientists at the University of Catool have announced that they have succeeded in equalling professional translators on more useful measures than any previous system. Using a tiered, pyramidal, pseudo-artificial neurotic network system, they have succeeded in creating a computer that can drink coffee, complain about low-paying clients and derive puns indistinguishably from any ... [ more ]
The Grapholinguist. by Davis Prickett. Time and Effort vs. Number of Readers ... [ more ]
Sharper Than the Serpent’s Tooth1. A Letter from Associate Editor Pete Bleackley. At Speculative Grammarian, we make no secret of the fact that various members of the Editorial Team have been known to dip their toes into the waters of Computational Linguistics, and have even been known to receive payment for doing so. What is less well known is that disagreements occasionally arise between us about which programming language to use for the purpose. While the more—shall we say “experienced”?2—computational linguists amongst us favour Perl,3 those with a more modern4 outlook advocate the use of Python.5 Python, of ... [ more ]
Minimalism for Mimes. by Watta Puntshlein. As Clyde looked up and noticed the confused and, in a few cases, hostile expressions with which his Minimalism paper was greeted ... [ more ]
Letters to the Editor. Dear SpecGram, I enjoyed your delightful Speculative Grammarian’s Song in your most recent issue. Unfortunately, though, reading it has infected me with a pernicious ear-worm in the form of The Elements by Tom Lehrer! What advice can you offer for getting rid of this psycholinguistic pest? I don’t want to resort to harsh chemical otovermicides. Yours vexedly, Antimony Arsenic ... Dear Old Lace, Hey there Pretty Woman—sounds like you’re going to need a homeopathic otovermicide. Don’t You Want Me, Baby, to explain how you can make your own? You can skip the exotic ingredients like Karma Chameleon and Eye of the Tiger. They aren’t really necessary. ... [ 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 ]
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Last updated Feb. 7, 2026.