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 ]
Personal Ads for Linguists—including linguists of every kind seeking romance, academic partnerships, and more—all with that special SpecGram twist. N.B.: Information in personal ads is provided by the submitters. The editors and publishers of Speculative Grammarian are not responsible for their content, including, but not limited to, typos, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, bad judgment, factual errors, bald-faced lies, or lapses in national security ... [ more ]
“Double-Dot Wide O / Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill” by J–––– J––––––.From Speculative Grammarian CLI.3; July 2006.Reviewed by Jonathan van der Meer. ... Double-Dot Wide O, Spoiler Alert !. It’s been more than eight years, so I’m going to go ahead and let you in on a little secret: the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill is a pig snort, and the double-dot wide O looks like a pig snout. (Some phoneticians will argue that they themselves produce a uvular trill. They probably do—especially when reading journals less interesting than SpecGram—but ... [ more ]
Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, BOOKS, SERIES, and MORE The following valuable volumes, spectacular series, and interesting items have been released with pride by Psammeticus Press, an academic publishing house founded in honor of the first and purest of linguistic inquirers: one might criticize his methods, but who could quibble with his results? Follow the links below to learn more about these fabulous books and excellent series, each destined to become a classic in the field. Warehouse Moving Sale We’ve lost the lease on our warehouse and anything we can’t sell we have to move—or rent interns from Speculative Grammarian to do it—and that’s expensive! Help us out and buy a ... [ more ]
— http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress Welcome to the online home of Panini Press, an academic publishing house formerly dedicated to the proposition that Linguistics is the noblest of the academic fields, but now with a focus on Subjects of more relevance to the Working Linguist’s everyday life and career. ❦पा Important announcements from Panini Press: ❧ Word Problems for Linguists (November 2025): Linguists, we here at Panini Press know you thought that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill. However, the real world often has other plans, so, for your own good, Dr. Barbara Millicent Roberts’s new book, Word ... [ 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 ]
Virtual NLP Dice.The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen. ... [Re-roll.] [Re-roll like you mean it!!] As many successful practitioners of Natural Language Processing know, the surest path to success is to come up with some complicated-looking equation and then rest on your mathematical laurels for the rest of your career—because “Math is hard, and hard things are for smart people, and smart people are just better. QED.” Or so we learned from the original ad for NLP Dice: “Local Linguist Mom Discovers One Weird Trick for Deriving NLP Equations!—Computational Linguists Hate Her!” (SpecGram ... [ more ]
In this study we explore how the linguist interacts with a wide range of structural variability by simulating not only the behavior of the trees themselves but also the behavior of the linguist. ... [ 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 ]
Anybody and everybody uses Roman script. 山巨 刀巨与巨尺立巨 仍巨十十巨尺。 What we need is something more distinctive. 与工以口-尺口爪凡以 亡口爪仍工以巨与 十廿巨 仍巨与十 口斤 巨凡与十 凡以刀 山巨与十。 Elegant, refined, and beautiful! 凹与巨 与工以口-尺口爪凡以！ ... [ more ]
SpecGram Puzzles and Games. Collected all in one place for your brain-teasing pleasure, below is a list of the currently available linguistically themed puzzles and games that have appeared over the years in SpecGram and related publications. Puzzles? Contents Acrostics | Anagrams | Choose Your Own Career | Crosswords | Cryptic Crosswords | Cryptograms | Domino Puzzles | Drop Quotes | EtymGeo™ | Fieldwork Puzzles | FonoFutoshiki | FonoNurikabe | HanjieLinguru | HashiWordakero | HitoriGuistiku | HomonimoKakuro | Interactive Fiction | IPA Code Puzzles | IPAlindromes | Language Identification | Latin Squares | LingDoku | Ling-Ken | L’Ishing | Logic Puzzles | Mad Libitum Games | Magic Squares | Masyu Ortograpiu ... [ 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 ]
I U Linguistics Club. Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. June 1978. ... i u linguistics club, edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... [ more ]
Draw Me a Linguist.Aster E. O’Gnosis and Margo Llicso. Much has been made recently in certain circles of the stereotypical views children have of scientists, and how those views are changed after paying a visit to CERN—all reflected in the drawings of the children. (Drollette, 2010) The cliché says that children are our future, and the humanizing effect of the CERN visit on children’s perceptions may eventually be parlayed into an increase in the number of young people who choose to pursue science as a profession, which of course results in better enrollment in college courses, and thus more funding for science departments. We figured linguistics could probably use some of that action, too. ... [ more ]
ADVERTISEMENTSpecGram Estates.A Retirement Community By Linguists, For Linguists1. The second greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become tenured—the status, the glory, the freedom! The greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become emeritus—the status, the glory, the freedom! Come and spend your golden years with us at SpecGram Estates; we understand you like no one else does, and we have the accommodation, the community, and the amenities that are just right for you! We all know that different linguists have different expectations of the world. At SpecGram Estates we personalize your retirement experience, creating ... [ more ]
Arabic Numeral to Numeri++ Converter.by Daniel Swanson & Trey Jones. Cognomen 2018 (SpecGram, CLXXX.3) in footnote ‡‡† lays out “a superior, novel solution” to extending Numeri++, his science-nerd–friendly upgrade to Roman numerals, to accommodate values beyond 5,000. Below we provide a handy converter† for the mathematically and/or typographically challenged among you who would like to use this system — † It appears that our buddy Prae-Prae put a little too much faith in the Unicode Consortium. Obviously any entity with “Consortium” right there in the name is not to be trusted fully. The biggest problem is that ... [ more ]
Оrthоgraрhіc Perрlехer. Welcome to the Speculative Grammarian Оrthοɡrаphіс Ρerplехеr! This not-quite-pointless little tool will munge your text, randomly replacing some characters with homoglyphs that are nearly identical1—or at least quite reasonably similar to the untrained eye. Why? To make text both very hard and very easy to find via normal search (try to find “οrthoɡrарhіс реrрleхer” on this page, for example); to confuse and amaze your friends and enemies alike;6 to pass the time in a ... [ more ]
The Far Side of the Real. Posthumously Published from the Manuscript Files of Paul Cain.- II -, The Ragged Way Some People Live . By 3:30 I had finished reading the papers. Somebody had done a nasty job but good on Boileau. On just the first page of the first article published by Linguistic Enquiry the same sentence appeared three times broken down and glossed as “I shot your dog and hung it from her ceiling,” “I too wish weasels could fly above the clouds,” and something baroquely, obscurely obscene about the reader’s mother, uncle, and dead grandfather. The morph fanŋʷɔ was glossed 28 different ways by my count: ‘cat,’ ... [ 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 ]
