Most Popular Pages—Today

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1. Archives (12 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. Merchandise (9 visits)

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 ]


3. Vol CLXV, No 4 (7 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 ]


4. The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics (5 visits)

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 ]


5. Linguimericks—Book १०४ (4 visits)

Linguimericks, Book १०४. Beaver PV Irony Phrasal verbs with animal stems Abound in English lexis— Like ‘beaver away at a conference’. And the irony is I noticed this With my beaver away at a conference —B Verr, I can’t face it! Word combos with face! Well, let’s chase ’em: There’s face off and the A-Team’s ‘the Faceman’ About face and volte face Examples amass If we simply sit down and we face ’em —Face Man, Sonnet 18(v2) Shall I compare thee to an allomorph? Thou art more complex and in form more rich Than any morpheme that one might attach To free or to bound roots, which then puts forth Its range of forms; ... [ more ]


6. Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are They Ever!—April May June (4 visits)

Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are They Ever!. by, April May June, Freshman in Elementary Education, Indiana University at Bloomington. It is — "Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — well-known from my L103 class that Turkish and Amharic supposedly aren't related, though it is no longer clear which languages they are related to. However, I have found lots of words in the two languages which sound alike and mean the same thing in only two months of hearing them spoken in two local restaurants. The similarities first caught my attention during an argument at the Turkish restaurant in which the owner kept saying "sought." ... [ more ] Book!


7. JLSSCNC—Is Manateean a Delphinic Creole?—Horatio Phocaena (3 visits)

Is Manateean a Delphinic Creole?. The Manateean language, spoken by a dwindling community in tropical south Florida, has long been noted for its simple grammatical structure. Bickerton (1987) compared Manateean with other pidgins and creoles and found that it closely paralleled them in structure. The implications of this discovery for the species-specificity of the innateness hypothesis were obvious; for it, like all sensible people, we accept Bickerton’s Language Bioprogram Hypothesis as an explanation for the common structure of pidgins, then we must suppose that the bioprogram inheres not only in humans but in at least one other large mammalian species as well. On the other hand, previous work (e.g. Greystoke 1937, ... [ more ]


8. Scriptominoes II—Trey Jones & Keith Slater (3 visits)

Scriptominoes II. by Trey Jones & Keith Slater. Traditional Dominosa is a puzzle game that requires you to pair numbers corresponding to the faces of dominoes. You are presented with a rectangular grid of numbers. Each number must be paired with one of its vertical or horizontal neighbors. As in a set of dominoes, each numerical value pairs exactly once with each other numerical value. See the original “Domiphones and Dominasals” (SpecGram CLXXXV.1) for a simple example if you are unfamiliar with the genre. Naturally, SpecGram’s version of the puzzle involves some linguistics-related twists. Rather than boring and obvious numerals, we use elements that linguists can enjoy and feel ... [ more ]


9. Table-Top Role-Playing Games in Spite of Linguists—Birucë Shkërbadër (3 visits)

Table-Top Role-Playing Games, For With Against in Spite of Linguists. A Cautionary Tale for DMs, Players, and Other Linguists, Birucë Shkërbadër. The following vignette highlights some of the hazards and headaches of allowing certain kinds of “undesirables” at your gaming table. This is a partial transcript of an actual gaming session, partially redacted for brevity and to protect the litigious, and very slightly memeified to better infect the zeitgeist. Party: *fighting the BBEG* Wizard: I cast Wish. DM: Cool. The air crackles with fate-bending power as the very fabric of the Weave thrums around you, ready to obey your will. ... [ more ]


10. SpecGram, Quarterly—A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief (3 visits)

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 ]


11. Lingua Pranca—Bilingualism in Rats: A Ten-Year Study—Loraine Obler (3 visits)

Bilingualism in Rats: A Ten-Year Study. or. How To Employ All The Equipment In The Neurolinguistic Laboratory. Loraine Obler. Much recent work of fair sophistication has explored various neuropsychological approaches to Hebrew-English bilingualism, in hopes of shedding some light on the more general problem of the brain’s organization for language, but little thought has been put to the deeper problem of how to impressively employ all the equipment in our laboratory. It is to investigate this profound issue that we propose the following project. Little is known about the mechanisms of bilingualism, and almost no work has been done in the rich field of bilingualism in rats, which field should ... [ more ]


12. Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (3 visits)

Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know, (because they aren’t actually true), gathered at great personal risk of, psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers, by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Beginner Speculations. This collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers—no slips of the keyboard or spell-checker auto-corrections can be blamed for these beauties—demonstrates how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them. The English language—Historical Aspects. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxon ... [ more ] Book!


13. Vol CLXXVII, No 4 (3 visits)

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXVII, Number 4 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Bill Spruiell, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Adam Baker, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Robin Day, Carin Marais, David Marino, Tel Monks, Laura Ryals, Mary Shapiro, Adham Smart, Kien-Wei Tseng, Don Unger; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Low-Hanging Fruit Tastes Just as Sweet; December 2016 ... [ more ]


14. A Compendium of Preferred Grammatical Inflections Across Select Demographic Cohorts—Declan Tchinovsky and Mairead O’Bleek (3 visits)

A Compendium of Preferred Grammatical Inflections, Across Select Demographic Cohorts. by Declan Tchinovsky and Mairead O’Bleek. This preliminary investigation seeks to illuminate the hitherto neglected nexus between sociocultural typologies and grammatical case preference. Although empirical rigor was judiciously avoided, the ensuing correlations are presented with the full solemnity they are worthy of. What is an exorcist’s favorite case? The possessive. What was Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s favorite case? The ablutive. What is a hypochondriac’s favorite case? The illative. What was Émile Zola’s favorite case? The accusative. What was Pope Gregory XIII’s favorite case? The dative. What ... [ more ]


15. Where are the Ghost Linguists?—Δρ. I.C. Дедпи Пол, Þн.δ. (3 visits)

Where are the Ghost Linguists?. Δρ. I.C. Дедпи Пол Þн.δ.. Over fifteen years ago, my friend and mentor—Dr. F. Ang Bangah, Ph.D.—published his seminal article, “Where are the Vampire Linguists?” (SpecGram Vol. CLVII, No. 2, 2009), in which he interpolated the plain facts presented in the HBO documentary television series True Blood into a call for leveraging the innate and explicit linguistic and anthropological knowledge of vampiric informants who are hundreds or even thousands of years old. Dr. Bangah initially opened the Vampiric Linguistics Advancement Department (V.L.A.D.) at the University ... [ more ]


16. Monkey See, Human Do—Mongo Yalbag (3 visits)

Monkey See, Human Do. by, Mongo Yalbag. One of the more benighted cogs in the SpecGram frozen ice cream machine of wit outdid himself a decade or so ago, writing, “The curious thing is that so few philosophers of language have taken proper notice of such texts. The usual analysis is that there’s word meanings, and then additional meaning is added or occurs (or whatever metaphysical sense you like) at higher levels of organization, syntactic or whatnot. Yet such passages indicate that higher levels of organization can actually subtract or cancel out the meanings encoded at lower levels, until in extreme cases the overall meaning actually attains negative values, causing you to possess less ... [ more ]


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Last updated Feb. 9, 2026.