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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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
ADVERTISEMENT An Exciting Linguistics Investment Opportunity!. Speculative Grammarian is pleased to announce our new cryptocurrency: SpecCoin. This is not our first venture into the world of cryptocurrencies. SafuPonzu, the coin with the cute picture of a Shiba Inu slathered in a Japanese citrus sauce, was originally created by the mysterious Davoshi J. Petermoto as a way to evade taxes on money he made inventing a language for a popular television show.1 SafuPonzu was ultimately shut down by federal regulators,2,3 but (unrelatedly) not before we opened the luxury compound that is home to the SpecGram resort on our privately owned Hawaiʻian island. What is ... [ more ]
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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 ]
Table-Top Role-Playing Games, For With Against in 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 three bigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of bigrams with which to fill it up. Using each bigram 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 December 15th, 2025. Solutions and solvers will be ... [ more ]
Phonetic Drop Quote III. Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur. Select phonemes from the columns to fill the spaces directly below them, revealing the transcription of a thematically appropriate quote. The transcription here is allegedly a broad transcription in General American English—though, as always, your dialect and/or transcription system may vary. If you’ve figured it out, you can submit your solution (in English or IPA) to the editors of SpecGram by December 15th, 2025. Solutions and solvers will be announced in the next issue. ... [ more ]
A Compendium of Preferred Grammatical Inflections, Across Select Demographic Cohorts. by Declan Tchinovsky and Mairead O’Bleek. This preliminary investigation seeks to illuminate the hitherto neglected nexus between sociocultural typologies and grammatical case preference. Although empirical rigor was judiciously avoided, the ensuing correlations are presented with the full solemnity they are worthy of. What is an exorcist’s favorite case? The possessive. What was Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s favorite case? The ablutive. What is a hypochondriac’s favorite case? The illative. What was Émile Zola’s favorite case? The accusative. What was Pope Gregory XIII’s favorite case? The dative. What ... [ 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 ]
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 ]
Linguimericks, Etc. Book ३५. Kenneth Lee Pike Ne’er met a language he didn’t like. Lauded creator of etic and emic, & a “demonstrably monolingual” acadēmic —Κόμμα Ο᾿Κῶλον Epitaph for SpecGram Spurious etymologies, Puns included, Extraordinary analyses that just might be right, Choose your own career (though it makes you sad), Government and binding in a liguisticky light, Reviews of non-existent books that send up fads, Aimless rantings, just like real papers, Much like The Onion but with nerdy capers —Col. O. Nihilist, Rubāʿī Concerning Discourse Come, chart a ... [ more ]
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Last updated Nov. 30, 2025.