SpecGram—And the Winner Is...—A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Last month—December 1, 2014, to be precise—marked the end of an era. More than two years in the making! Over a hundred hours of photographic planning, prop procurement, and picture-taking! Eighteen months of promoting! Dozens of dollars and scores of minutes spent on marketing! Finally The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics Cover Contest came to an end.

Due to an early lack of entries, we decided to open the contest to a wider audience—and since we already had a Vulpis-Tesla array and a Mod-60 OCE board in the fifth floor interns’ infirmary, we decided to drop the requirement that entrants be living. Unfortunately this opened a can of legal worms—doubly unfortunate considering the number of worms already involved—and on the advice of counsel we chose to comply with provisions of the United Nations’ proposed but as-yet-unratified Zeitgeist for Observances of Mortified Beings International Entente, which offers special accommodations for the deceased.

As a result, one hundred entrants were declared co-winners, listed below. Having so many winners strained our prize budget, and as a result we have offered the winners a recalibrated prize package, consisting of a limited edition SpecGram air freshener and the honor of being listed below, with two randomly selected winners to be featured on the cover of this and the next issues. None of the winners objected, and so that is what we’ve done. The signed copy of the SpecGram book will be repurposed as a future prize.

• Holger Pedersen

• Mikołaj Kruszewski

• Franz Boaz

• Franc Miklošič

• Rasmus Rask

• Henry Sweet

• Jean-François Champollion

• Eduard Sievers

• Jacob Grimm

• James Murray

• William Jones

• Otto Jespersen

• Ferdinand de Saussure

• Karl Verner

• Franz Bopp

• William Chester Minor

• Nikolay Marr

• Edward Sapir

• Daniel Jones

• Leonard Bloomfield

• Paul Broca

• George Zipf

• Hermann Grassmann

• Benjamin Lee Whorf

• Roman Jakobson

• Carl Wernicke

• Louis Hjelmslev

• L. L. Zamenhof

• Berthold Delbrück

• Wilhelm von Humboldt

• Wilhelm Bleek

• Lucy Lloyd

• Edward William Lane

• Ivar Aasen

• Charles Hockett

• Carl Magnus Zander

• Nils Flensburg

• Antonio de Nebrija

• Benjamin Ide Wheeler

• Julius Oppert

• Johann Christoph Adelung

• Claude Favre de Vaugelas

• Vilhelm Thomsen

• Viggo Brøndal

• Carl Meinhof

• Joshua Whatmough

• Jan Baudouin de Courtenay

• Johann Gottfried Herder

• August Leskien

• John Deere

• Karl Richard Lepsius

• Sigurd Agrell

• Edward Schröder

• Semen Novgorodov

• Motoori Norinaga

• Vladimir Dal

• William Dwight Whitney

• Noah Webster

• Max Müller

• Iha Fuyū

• Paul Georg von Möllendorff

• Hormuzd Rassam

• Frédéric Mistral

• Jakob Jakobsen

• Daniel Schwenter

• Moriz Haupt

• Hans Ferdinand Massmann

• Qian Xuantong

• Julius Zacher

• Jean-Jacques Ampère

• Wilhelm Wackernagel

• Axel Kock

• Ivan Macun

• Karl Brugmann

• Sun Yirang

• Friedrich Leo

• Ivan Broz

• Samuel Johnson

• Yakov Grot

• Jean-Pierre Rousselot

• Johan August Lundell

• Hunfalvy Pál

• Hubert Pernot

• Jonas Jablonskis

• Paul Olaf Bodding

• Karl Becker

• Matija Murko

• Pavlo Zhytetsky

• Pāṇini

• Otto Jahn

• Josef Dobrovský

• Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

• Szarvas Gábor

• Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann

• Julius Schubring

• Adolf Ellissen

• Jérémie-Jacques Oberlin

• Georg Wenker

...and the featured winners are Alice Kober, pictured on this month’s cover, and Teena Rochfort-Smith, to be pictured on the February issue cover. Congratulations to all.

And for all of those who want to know what that mess on the cover really is... it’s the desk of Arkhibuldinho Rasputinsky McFudgment, SpecGram Senior Junior Editor, Ret. Individual items are highlighted in the picture below and explained further down.

1: Speculative Grammarian Brand™ Halazone Water Purification Tablets

2,3: Vacuum tubes from Κολοσσός

4: SpecGram Stratificational Mac-n-Cheese magnet

5: A classic of satirical linguistics we hope to feature one day

6:A Sikɹɪt Kɹʌʃ Linguist’s Locket

7: SpecGram Ainu Teapot magnet

8: Original copy of “Primitives Are Not Primitive”

9: Note from Skip Tacular

10: Original artwork for the Phonetic Knights

11: Note from Butch McBastard

12: Post-dated Panini Press “sponsorship” check

13: Original photo of Spinning Jenny, a member of the Dores, taken by Claude Searsplainpockets

14: Original hardcopy of Linguist of Fortune

15: Original SpecGram Straw Men photo

16: The Best Lx Bands Evar!! poster

17: Infamous Rejected Paper

18: XT-17 Uzi/Reel-to-Reel Recorder

19: “The Joy of Old and Odd Books”, Letter from the Managing Editor, original IPA proof page

20: Ʌndərwʊd Portable IPA Typewriter

21: Dog clicker used on David J. Peterson in Language Made Difficult, Vol. VI

22: Original Grand Unified Intuitive Linguistic Theory diagram

23: Indo-European Crossword Puzzle No. 1

24: Ye Olde English Marmot Recipe

25: Review copy of Wailin’ Jennings’ Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Linguists

26: Speculative Grammarian Editorial Hotline phone

27: Claude Searsplainpockets’ raw data for Perry So-so, Tʷɪči, Pιčkιt, Åriðmatçəl, Spanyol, and Benhirloŋtam

28: Early draft of “Variation in the English Indefinite Article”

29: Nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill note from Jonathan van der Meer

30: Original scrolls of SpecGram, the Religion

31: “Aslay Oflay Etyay Unlay-itledtay”, referenced in “Morphological Spectroscopy”

32: Original manuscript for “English Writing System Reform—An Immodest Proposal”

33: “ıɯɐɹʇsɐd punod” as mentioned in the Dooms/Punod Manuscript

34: The source of Schadenpoodle’s fear of fieldwork

35: For use in Flogging Chamber #3

36: Failed attempt to place Dr. Seuss’s proposed letter Vroo into the IPA vowel chart

37: Handwritten manuscript for “Twenty Special Forms of Rhetoric”

38: Original hardcopy of Psammeticus Quarterly XVI.1

39: May 2065, next review from the International Advisory Council of Speculative Grammarian

40: Summer 2059, Next review by the Grammar Entelechy

41: 2044, Chomskadamus predicts the Esperanto Revolt

42: 2104, Chomskadamus predicts linguistics finally gets solid scientific underpinnings in an ingenious interdisciplinary academic fusion achieved by none other than Noam Q. Chomsky, IV. The field is more accurately renamed “Neuro-quantum-stomatology”.

43: Note to Claude Searsplainpockets from Helga von Helganschtein y Searsplainpockets about (27)

44: Original hardcopy of Babel, either I.1 or I.2, but obviously not I.3

45: Hardcover Cartoon Theories of Linguistics book, from The SpecGram Rare Book Collection

46: Studies out in Left Field, an important philosophical precursor to The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics, from the SpecGram Rare Book collection

47: Linguistic Deskwork hardcover, from the SpecGram Rare Book collection

48: Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames: The D’Antin Manuscript, source of much amusement from SpecGram on social media

49: Hardcover of the full Field Guide to Linguists, the SpecGram Rare Book collection, excerpted in two parts in SpecGram

50-53: Q1-Q4 TPS reports Arkhie should have filed

54: Fetish idol of Kokopelli, consort of Gheldrudda and father of Phonē

55: The Black Box, used for Black Box Testing in Linguistics

56: Editorial maté cup, filled by interns as needed

57-60: Jungftak feathers, the preferred quill of Cryptolexicographers

61: A stone word like those identified by Greenberg and Ruhlen

62: Lockwood’s Introduction to Stratificational Linguistics, an important precursor to, for example, Bideliciousness in Spaghettiomeatballology

63: Charles F. Hockett’s A Course in Modern Linguistics

64: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, essential reading for those who would avert the disaster of a “unified theory”

65: Joseph Greenberg’s Universals of Language, half of the recipient of a Chiasmus of the Month award

66: Leonard Bloomfield’s Language, possibly “the sorriest absurdity in the 500-year history of the printing press”, that failed to account for variation in the English indefinite article, and may have been second-hand self-plagiarism.

67: Geoff Pullum’s The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, vital to any intelligent discussion of endnotes vs. footnotes

68: Sapir’s Language, published while in exile in Canada

69: Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously after being deciphered by cryptologists

70: Benjamin Lee Whorf‘s Language, Thought, and Reality—the reality of his thoughts on language were subject to a laboratory test decades later

71: The cup from which coffee was spilled onto Keith’s best pants in Language Made Difficult, Vol. III.

72: A hat worn by Tim Pulju, as discussed in the SpecGram letters

73: One of the gargoyles traded for Bloomfield—smaller than expected, eh?

74: A crocodile egg, without which one cannot have crocodiles

75: Inspiration for the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill (alleged)

76: Compass used in the straight edge and compass construction proving the indeterminacy of the Gödel number in Greek numerals for the statement of Gödel’s Theorem

77: Dividers used to cheat during the straight edge and compass construction proving the indeterminacy of the Gödel number in Greek numerals for the statement of Gödel’s Theorem

78: The Mayan calendar the SpecGram editors used to countdown the end of the 13th b’ak’tun, just in case

79: A pocket watch demanded by the generation of more uppity, less congenial editors

80: Ruler used to encourage test subjects to use simple syntax and limit themselves to a controlled vocabulary

81: Dialect Continuum Language Studies study sheet (Basque to Swahili, 98.9% complete)

82: Some scissors, of the type a computational linguist can run with

83,84: Genuine Ancient Greek inkwells used to for writing CountenanceScroll and Chirper papyri, according to the iCove posting by AnneThrax!!1!

85: Gear from an Edinburgensian gear train from an Appalachian dialect

86: Extremely valuable—and thus likely stolen—office supplies

87: A cat-Ø-Ø-Ø-Ø-Ø-Ø-Ø-Ø

88: Nonsense and/or mischief caused by the Γραμματο-Χαοτικον

89: What you get when your interns don’t know the difference between piranha and Pirahã

90,91: Souvenirs from a trip to the !Kanga Tribal Research Resort

92: A remnant from Arkhie’s days as an Assistant Professor

93: The magnet ring at the heart of a Zipfian Emic Alignmentation Locus

94: A statue dedicated to Metalleus’s serenely and smilingly witless Informant

95: A philter of written Russian; that is, a Cyrillic elixir