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 ]
The “Panama Guzzler” Anagram Puzzle.Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Washington D.C.. You may or may not have noticed something a bit off in the article earlier in this issue by Barb Tyd-Laika and Tessie Chopp Durnford, entitled “The Nasal Tone: An Honest Tale”. If you did, then either you are very sensitive to nuanced subtleties of language, or you are just really paranoid.1 If not, you obviously have all the finesse of a rock thrown through a plate glass window. In any event, the text is indeed special. It is what I like to call a “Panama Guzzler” Anagram Puzzle. Now, even if you are a little dim, you may have noticed that panama guzzler is an anagram of ... [ more ]
A Preliminary Study of Immigrant Mongolian, Transhumance Patterns in Western Jamaica.Siobhan Chavannes, Research Assistant in Anthropology, Ravi Turbopropwala, Institute for Transhimalayan Studies, Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh, India. The immigrant Mongolian communities of the New World are relatively little-known among anthropologists. While the Kalmyk communities of New Jersey and Philadelphia have received some scholarly notice, the immigrant Mongolian community of western Jamaica has heretofore been entirely ignored by the western scholarly community. Like the Kalmyks of the United States, the Mongolians of western Jamaica emigrated to the New World after displacement during World War II. Settled in Jamaica in 1947 ... [ 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 ]
Numeri++.Praenomen Gentilicium Cognomen, Esq.. It would be a great leap forward in humanities-nerd–science-nerd relations if we could convince the STEMmier nerds that linguistics is at least kinda interesting. Of course, linguistics really is interesting, but we have to rope them in first; baby steps are needed before we go full-tilt “minimally transmogrificational principals and parametric aleph movement Chornskyan hegemony” on them. We need to ease them in with simpler things—fun stuff like auto-antonyms, and useful stuff like what distinguishes en dashes and em dashes, or how to properly use a semicolon. It seems fair to expect our partially ... [ 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 ]
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 ]
How Do I Love Thee?, Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram.Alex Savoy.[Author’s Note: Quite in fitting with the approach of Valentine’s Day, I submit this love poem, which, surprisingly, actually worked—though alas I am no longer dating said person anymore, which is why I am bitterly prostituting this former declaration of love, which I have suitably altered for the occasion.] How do I love thee? Let me draw a tree diagram— I was maundering, lonely as a bilabial trill, When I first heard your voice—(some breathy strange tongue), I was love-struck at once—(after all, I was young), How rounded your mouth, And iotally perfect your skin. Your eyes are like geminates, plosive and clear, ... [ more ]
Pseudo-Psiblings™ And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families.A proposal for improving and clarifying family nomenclature for the 21st century.by Trey Jones.Introduction. Language evolves—otherwise we’d all be able to read Beowulf in the original, right? Sometimes language changes in response to cultural changes. But sometimes it doesn’t change fast enough to keep up with cultural changes. This paper seeks to give English a little push in a much-needed direction. There has been a fairly radical change in Western society in the last hundred years or so. It used to be that if a woman was on her fourth husband, one automatically felt a little sorry for ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another installment of indeterminate regularity in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. The Laziest Language on Earth. An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Perry So-so0.Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 61, Introduction. Back in 1922, my Historical Linguistics professor, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, noted that ease of articulation is a driving force in language change—hence the regular occurrence of lenition rules—but the opposing need to maintain a clear communication channel prevents everything from degenerating to a long low mid vowel. Turns out ... [ more ]
On the Necessity of a Tri-Branching Corpse.by Tirizdi.(Translated from the Original Zhyler1 by Quentin Popinjay Snodgrass, Ph.D.).In his landmark text Zixÿ Erwilevö (usually translated as On Humanish Language), the great Zhylerian philosopher Tirizdi explains everything from language acquisition to hypothetical phonetics. As the tome itself is rather ponderous (the expanded second edition contains more than two thousand pages of text), Tirizdi published several articles which summarize his points on, for example, phonology, semantics, and the pragmatics of combat. The present article is a condensation of chapter seventeen, regarding the way in which words are put ... [ 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
Modern and Historical Graphical Representations of Structural Relationships in Spoken and Written English Sentential Utterances. selected and presented, with commentary, by, Nattapoŋ Yunloŋ Seuŋyoŋ BFE University, Waikikamukau, New Zealand With the mild splash created last year by Florey’s small but sincere homage, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, sentence diagramming (Figure 1) was momentarily en vogue. Of course, it didn’t last long, as any student of the field could have predicted, because diagramming sentences is generally quite a boring task. The general population will look cursorily at a cleverly diagrammed sentence, in much the way they look at car wrecks on the ... [ more ]
“Interpretez seront les extipices”, On the Correct Interpretation of Nostradamus, Part the Third.by Roger Prentiss Claremont, Independent Sovereign Scholar. In Parts the First and Second of this series, we discussed the basis of our new interpretation of the prophetic verses of Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), usually known as Nostradamus. His verses have eluded definitive interpretation for several centuries, and this series shows that that is because earlier interpretations made the basic error of assuming his verses were in French. In fact, they are better interpreted as English encoded in French. This part shall complete the task of interpretation of selected verses, after which we shall turn ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another installment of indeterminate regularity in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. The Hidden Language of Public Seduction. An Anthropological Linguistic Study of Spanyol0.Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 60, Introduction. Earlier this year, in preparation for fieldwork in Mozambique, Chad, and Japan, I decided to review some Spanish-language pedagogical audio materials (Cash 2007). As I was listening intently and re-acquainting myself with this beautiful language, I was quite surprised to hear many seemingly innocuous phrases presented with a tone of voice that ... [ more ]
