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 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
— 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
An Excursus in Orthographic Cosmology and/or, Cosmological Orthography of the Babelverse, A Preliminary Report. Claudette von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets, and Helgi von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets, Principal Interns in Quantum Physicolinguistics, The Institute for Bibliotecababelology Ẍ enoörthographic Quasȉcosmogȍnич Keplȯπτολεμαοhawkinġian Ṕortulaṕonticular Ǣdificōcōnstrūctiōnæ — known colloquially, though inexactly, as “omnidimensional alphabridges” — are long- theorized but little- evidenced hypothetical, potential, side- effectual artefacts of high- speed wh- movement at lexico- quantum scale in environments of ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another irregular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series.’Trilaas in Manila An Anthropological Linguistic Study of Multi-Trill Counting0.Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 64, There is a little-known tribe—living in diaspora and without a homeland—whose otherwise mind-numbingly boring language features a remarkable counting system unlike any other. We caught up with a large group living in the capital of the Philippines. Several older members of the tribe claim the name of the tribe was once “Obliert Rilaasiant” but no ... [ more ]
