SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 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 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Psammeticus Press, www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, NEW SERIES OF SERIES Grammars in Contrast Series Series, presented by Psammeticus Press We at Psammeticus Press had never really understood the point of “contrastive” grammars. Who in the world cares what features of Kham Tibetan are not like Swahili (or vice-versa)? We can only suppose that these people are trying to show off their knowledge of two unrelated languages. But then recently, we got to thinking. If we’ve learned anything from structuralism (and honestly, we’re not entirely sure that we have), it’s that meaning is found only in contrast. But grammatical contrasts are not ... [ more ]

The Influence of Seasonings in Middle and Modern English. Rosemary and Basil Dillon. English cuisine is notorious for being heavy in the stomach and light on flavor. However, it would be incorrect to presume that this has always been the case.¹ A careful examination of literature in the Middle and Early Modern English periods provides compelling evidence that the English were once spice-crazy. Take, for example, one of the earliest known songs in English. Sumer is icumen in, (Cumin is in/from Sumer) We must admire the historical and philological chops of England in the Middle Ages. Not only does cumin originate in the historical area of ancient Sumer, it also happens to be one of the few words in English ... [ more ]

Uncovering the Hidden Secrets of Alphapointillism. Jonathan van der Meer and Lagâri Hasan Çelebi, Center for Computational Bioinformatics and Linguistics, NYC, NY. ... A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jot and La Tour Affixal, two of Georges Seubscript’s most famous and most important works. In 1889, only a few short years before his untimely death in an unfortunate palato-uvular co-articulation accident, famed and acclaimed alphapointillist Georges Seubscript created a truly enigmatic work, the purpose and subject of which has mystified and bewildered historical linguists and art historians alike for many decades. Unlike his more famous alphapointillist works, “A Sunday ... [ more ]

IPAlindromes II—Find the IPAlindrome!. Mary Shapiro, Truman State University. In the last installment, I introduced the idea of the IPAlindrome (based on phonemic and/or phonetic transcription rather than written English). This time, it’s up to you to uncover the IPAlindrome, based on the given paraphrases. The IPAlindromes here are all phonemic, ignoring allophonic variation introduced by aspiration, nasalization, etc. As last time, diphthongs are treated as single units. E.g. (A pithy observation, not a full sentence.) When the mind is not sharp, using a trademarked chemical product to remove body hair leads to exsanguination. → Dull brain, Nair, blood. Below are five more for you to figure ... [ more ]

Συυιτχεροο—Γάμμα— Double Trouble. by Ἔλλειψις Ἀστερίσκος and Ἔλλειψις Ἀπόστροφος. In this third puzzle of letter switcheroos, your task is—for each pair of words below—to form two new words by swapping not one but two letters from each word, which will generally result in new words that are more appropriate for a SpecGram audience. For ... [ more ]

Brother, Can You Paradigm?. Written by Harris Risman¹, 1. Show respect to the Gracious Grammarian, Though his foes call him Brutal Barbarian. It takes chutzpah and nerve to ignore the chef-d’oeuvre, Of a hero and humanitarian. 1.1, He is prince without peer. He is hailed as a seer, By disciples from Dover² to Darien³. 2. He never need ask “Can you spare a dime?”⁴, He’s transformed⁵ his whole field with his paradigm.⁶, Though he generates strife, His ideas brought green life, To a dried up and colorless arid time.⁷, ... [ more ]

Académie Française Has Banned Conlanging, Again. SpecGram Wire Services. Paris, France—Today marked the 85th consecutive year in which l’Académie française has banned conlanging. The convened panel of Immortals (as members are officially known) passed the measure, a terse 400 words in French (or 70 in its English translation) in a twelve minute discussion that opened with the reading of a passage reminding everyone that the Immortals’ resplendent green uniforms were adopted specifically to denote the military spirit needed for “The War on Conlanging.” Critics of the move have lambasted l’Académie. One detractor, speaking on condition 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 ]

Spelling Made Simple. Rev. Q. X. Shawtwain. One of my parishioners was recently bemoaning the falling standards of spelling amongst today’s youth. I was obliged to point out to him that this is a problem with deep historical roots. Ever since our ancestors foolishly abandoned their noble Futhorc in favour of the Popish Roman alphabet, English spelling has been pulled hither and yon by the foreign influences of Latin, French, and who knows what else? until it is surprising that anyone can spell anything at all. While many have tried to reform our spelling over the years, their efforts have been limited by the constraints of the Roman alphabet. They would have been better to imitate the wise king of Korea, who made a new ... [ 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 ]

Mix & Match #. by Max & Mitch Ninelette. The goal of this Mix & Match puzzle is to reconstitute a set of nine 9-letter words that have each had two quadgrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of quadgrams with which to fill it up. Using each quadgram once, fill the blanks in the table to form various nine-letter words. When you are done, three additional words will be revealed in the vertical direction for each puzzle. If you think you’ve figured out all the answers—that’s 24 nine-letter words!—submit your solution to the editors of SpecGram by January 15, 2020, and you could win a prize. Solutions and winners will ... [ more ]

Shigudo, Reluctantly. Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton. In 1963, at the tender age of 24, I found myself on an expedition deep in the Amazon Basin, up a smallish tributary of the Río Ucayali. There we encountered a well-established tribe of indigenous people, numbering close to 400 and living in relative isolation, who called themselves the Shigudo. Several members of the tribe spoke nearly fluent Spanish,¹ and we were able to communicate quite effectively with them. As our expedition was chiefly anthropological in nature, and the Shigudo were, anthropologically ... [ more ]

~~Rasmus Rask~~ Schwa Puzzle. by Lila Rosa Grau. This is a schwa-themed variant of my popular Rasmus Rask puzzle. The puzzle is similar to a crossword puzzle, in that there is a grid for filling in words and phrases, and clues for the ACROSS and DOWN directions. However, all the squares in the puzzle are filled with letters, and the answers to the clues may (but are not required to) overlap. Clues for a particular row or column are given together, in the order they appear in the grid. No indication of the amount of overlap between clues is given. Three overlapping sets of letters spelling out SCHWA in a rough schwa shape are given to provide a framework for filling in the answers. Complete the ... [ more ]

The Dictionary of What Things Should Mean, According to Non-Linguists. P. Ublekkoppen Ñon & Suṛɨ Vē X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. Linguistics, as a subject—despite its obvious universal appeal and global applicability—is not well-known or well-understood by non-linguists. We—and a large team of uncredited and unpaid XQK interns—have taken it to the streets, so to speak, to get a better sense of how the linguistic laity grok our jargon and/or terms of art. Presented below are over 100 “definitions” of linguistic and linguistic-adjacent terms, provided to us by the general ... [ more ]

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