Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCV, Number 1 Antepenultimate 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, Andrew Lamont, Gabriel Lanyi, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; Declarative in the Streets, Hortative in the Sheets; September 2025, ... [ more ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
With the passage of time many documents buried in the British archives have been released, including some of extreme scientific and scholarly interest, such as the first-person account of pre-Islamic religious survivals in the Zagros region edited by Richard Cowper under the title “The Web of the Magi.” Of equally great interest to both linguistic scholars and Sherlockians is the following text relating events in exactly the same month as in Cowper’s text, revealing just one small aspect of the social changes in India under British rule.The Adventure of the Bandicoot Delivery.by, John Watson, M.D. [Transcribed and edited by, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, and Trey Jones]. Among the most ... [ more ]
Improving L2 Performance with Pirahã Shigudo, and Simple English.The effects of syntactic and semantic priming on successful L2 communication.Jeannot Van Tricasse, Jules Verne University, Paris, France. As is well known, students of foreign languages are often frustrated by their lack of ability to express thoughts of normal complexity in the language they are studying.1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 This frustration can easily turn into a bitterness that leaves the student unable or unwilling to continue their language studies, even after a year or more of study.11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 This is an unfortunate state of affairs for many reasons. Bilingualism has been implicated in ... [ 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
Overheard* in the Linguistics Student Lounge.Chesterton “ T͡ʃazː ” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV, Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers**, Fifth-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton All names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent. Preterite: I have just elicited, from a native speaker, the fact that there is no Spanish word for “rhubarb”. Etymologically: So what do actors in crowd scenes repeat in Spanish movies and TV shows then? Transitively: Just because a native speaker doesn’t know a word doesn’t mean it ... [ more ]
Orthographically-Conditioned Morphology.CJ Quines. Motivation. The other day1 I received through personal correspondence2 the following note: “BTW, we have a fairly extensive PR from someone to i18nize something.” From my extensive experience with sociolinguistics,3 I instantly understood some of the abbreviations used in this sentence, such as BTW meaning By The Way, or PR meaning Pull Request, something we trust the computational linguists in the audience are intimately familiar with. But the interesting piece of data here is “i18nize”. The numeronym4 stands for internationalization, with the number 18 as there are 18 ... [ more ]
How Many is Umpteen?.A Linguistic and Mathematical Exploration and Explanation. brought to you by Ura Hogg, of Skaroo University1, and the Letter U. We have all heard various people use the quasi-numerical expression umpteen to refer to a largish number of items, as in (1) below: (1) I have umpteen things to do before I can leave.2 What I plan to do in this brief paper is to determine how many umpteen is. First I feel I must in part justify the claim that umpteen can in fact refer to an exact numerical quantity despite its varying use.3 Though we often use vague number expressions such as in (2) and (3) below, we nearly as often use exact, though large, ... [ more ]
A Letter from Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju. In an era of tweets and AI summaries, the news that Speculative Grammarian will be ceasing publication by the end of 2025 should, perhaps, come as no surprise.1 Readers accustomed to postings of no more than 280 characters, or to AI that boils everything down to a few sentences, can have little interest in reading articles that include, in some cases, hundreds of words arranged in several paragraphs.2 Perhaps, too, the editorial board was influenced by an article published some twenty years ago in this very journal, which argued that as papers go, the shorter, the better. Taking this argument to its logical (though not necessarily unimpeachable) conclusion, the ... [ more ]
How to Write a Speculative Grammarian Article*.The Editors. We get asked a lot of questions here at SpecGram headquarters. “Can you diagram this sentence for me?”1 “Do English modals have past forms spelled with consonants that are not etymologically supported?”2 “Did the SpecGram movie win any awards at a major film festival, and, if so, did Slappy Smith get the nod for his amazing portrayal of David J. Peterson?”3 We also get a lot of questions that would be better directed to various emergency response teams, possibly due to fat-finger dialing mistakes.4 By far the most common question we ... [ 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 trigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of trigrams with which to fill it up. Using each trigram 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 September 28th, 2025. Solutions and solvers will be ... [ 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 ]
Letters to the Editor.Note: for this letters installment, we’ve limited letters to replies to various poems. That should keep the discussion polite and high-minded, right? —Eds. Sirs, Your ‘linguimerick’ (what’s that?) from Alfie and Ada (your grandfather’s parents?) is only slightly less metrically, lyrically and poetically offensive than it is inaccurate both historico-linguistically and linguistico-historically. Not only was there no such thing as the ‘Latin alphabet’ (instead, various alphabets emerged at different points in the lengthy evolution of the set of lects umbrella-termed ‘Latin’) but crucially, critically and crepuscularly, the ... [ more ]
The Solution to Poor Pedantry is... More, Better Pedantry.Bück Würm, E. G. Ghed, and Petra Gogue, The Meta-Pedantry Association, Division of Philology and Linguistics. Pedants are traditionally seen by the general populace as annoying know-it-alls who stick their noses where they don’t belong, disrupting whatever social setting they find themselves in, while adding very little to the proceedings they have interrupted. Philologists, grammarians, glottologists, linguists, linguisticians, langualogists, linguaphiles, ling-geeks, word nerds, and tongue monkeys tend to doubly damn the irritating intrusion of pesky pedants: in addition to their bothersome butt-in-ery, when it comes to ... [ more ]
Linguimericks, Book १०३. Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder if you are, Like a diamond in the sky, Worth it to divert my eye.* Crap! That didn’t help one jot. Now I’ve lost my train of thought —Loki Sid, If you wanna learn Welsh, from the get-go Beware [ ɬ ]. I should let you know This lateral fricative Some find prohibitive And end up in lovely [kl]andudno —Saint Tudno, Ph.D. in hand Proud, yet scared the world will learn— I’m an impostor! —Lauren Ipsum, Fungal infection Toenail’s yellow and brittle (Prof said, “Add foot notes”) —Paul Bunion, Passive Aggressive ‘Your head hurts’ and ‘You hurt your ... [ more ]
