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 ]
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 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian and SpecGram.com.Our Story. The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields. SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while ... [ more ]
I Will Not Say: Do Not Weep; For Not All Tears Are An Evil.A Letter From the Surviving Editors. As regular readers will be aware, the fortunes of Speculative Grammarian have waxed and waned over the centuries. Those of us who have worked on the journal in recent years count ourselves lucky to have done so in a golden age of linguistic satire. However, it is not possible to puncture the pretensions of linguistics as assiduously as we have done without making some enemies. Recently, we have attracted the hostility of a shadowy cabal involving Noam Chomsky, OpenAI, and the International Brotherhood of Agistors, Lamplighters, Journal Interns, Ushkuyniks, & Zoögraphers. To evade their nefarious attentions, we now find ... [ 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 ]
The SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda. Welcome to the SpecGramMinistry 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 ]
Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP.Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. Please review previously discussed materials as needed. Now that that is taken care of, let us consider why Natural Language Processing (or, its alter-ego, Computational Linguistics) has not been the resounding success regularly predicted by the NLP faithful: We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry/over-ripe. Time/Fruit flies like a(n) arrow/banana. pretty little girl’s school crying computational linguist Up next: Lexicostatistics vs Glottochronology. References, Baeza-Yates, Ricardo and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information ... [ more ]
Table-Top Role-Playing Games, ForWithAgainstin 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
Rasmus Rask Parallel Puzzle XIX.by Lila Rosa Grau. This is the nineteenth Rasmus Rask puzzle, devoted to the original Mr. Charming Scandinavian Linguist. 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 a Rasmus Rask 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. Letters spelling out RASMUS RASK along two parallel diagonals are given to provide a framework for filling in ... [ more ]
PAID ADVERTISEMENT — http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress New from Panini Press! .Word Problems for Linguists ❦पा by Barbara Millicent Roberts, Ph.D. Department of Applied Mathematical Linguistics Handler University Published 2025. 194 pg. Linguists! You’ve spent years dissecting syntax trees, contemplating the very origin of language itself, and arguing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Voynich manuscript with clueless neckbeards online—safe in the knowledge that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill—and if you have tenure, you don’t even have to do ... [ more ]
Phonetic Drop Quote III.Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur. Select phonemes from the columns to fill the spaces directly below them, revealing the transcription of a thematically appropriate quote. The transcription here is allegedly a broad transcription in General American English—though, as always, your dialect and/or transcription system may vary. If you’ve figured it out, you can submit your solution (in English or IPA) to the editors of SpecGram by December 15th, 2025. Solutions and solvers will be announced in the next issue. ... [ more ]
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 ]
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 three bigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of bigrams with which to fill it up. Using each bigram 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 December 15th, 2025. Solutions and solvers will be ... [ more ]
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 ]
Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics.by Trey Jones. As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been. Let the adventure begin ... [ more ]
