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Letter to the Editor. The following letter to the editor has unfortunately been "lost" in the SpecGram mailroom for more than ten years. It appears that our head mail sorter, the once famous Nim Chimpsky, has apparently been tossing incoming mail behind cabinets for years. We are now in the process of sorting through the misplaced mail. It turns out that in addition to the interesting letter below, we may have already won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes several times. --ed. April 1993 To the Editors: I have recently seen evidence for the subtle but powerful theory presented in Greenan and Hopp's article "Minimal Forests". In a recent class of an Introductory Linguistics course, the instructor was, coincidentally ... [ more ]
A Sample of Self-Definers— Historical Linguistics, Etymology, and Sound Changes: Part II. The SpecGram Book Elves™. Here is a sixth hand-curated selection from “Appendix A: A Self-Defining Linguistic Glossary” a.k.a. “The only truly reliable cram sheet for your Linguistics 101 final” from The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics. Hapax occurs in the corpus twice; legomenon only once. haplogy, lenizhion, Calque is a loanword from French. metophony, methatesis, mispronounciation, nansal infinx, Neologiphiles like neologisms. Nonce words are honorificabilitudinitatibus!, Osthoff’s Lăw, RE: analysis, ... [ more ]
Don’t Baby That Baby, Baby. A Letter from the Editor-at-Bat, Butch McBastard. Despite the attempts by those who study the phenomenon to dress it up in jargon (“caretaker speech”), cutesiness (“motherese”), or TLAs (IDS/CDS—“infant-/child-directed speech”), baby talk is still baby talk, and frankly as a linguist I’m insulted that you think I’d fall for that kind of whitewashing of such a despicable practice. That’s right, I said it, baby talk is despicable. In addition to making one sound like a recent sufferer of ailuric prional exposure, it’s the kind of mollycoddling that has all but ruined several of the more recent generations ... [ more ]
Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part IV — Statistical Machine Translation. Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. We will dispense with the preliminaries, and get to the meat of the matter. For the next installment in our Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, we will turn our attention to statistical machine translation, using semi- automatically aligned texts: ... Next time: Phonetics vs. Phonology with guest cartoonist Hilário Parenchyma. References, Booth, A. D. L. Brandwood, and J. P. Cleave (1958). Mechanical resolution of linguistic problems. Butterworths Scientific Publications. Brown, P. S. Della Pietra, V. Della Pietra, and R. Mercer (1991). “The ... [ more ]
Propreantepenultimate Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know, (because they aren’t actually true), gathered at great personal risk of, psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira This 66th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them. On Linguistic Arbitrariness. Arbitrariness is characteristic of human spoken language, that is, the language creates the conditions. This is the linguistic relativity hypnosis. Linguistic signs are arbitrary. ... [ 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 ]
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 ]
The SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda. Welcome to the SpecGram Ministry 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. If you have ideas for other messages that need ... [ more ]
Refining Autosegmental Phonology. There can be little doubt that the greatest innovation in phonology of the past two thousand years was the development of the concept of separate tiers. However, current brands of autosegmental phonology have failed to exploit this innovation to the full, so that as a result they still show influences from outmoded structuralist theory. This paper will rectify that failing. The first major problem of modern autosegmentalism is that it doesn’t have enough tiers. The fact is, every single distinctive feature should have its own tier. The second problem is that the modern timing tier retains the silly structuralist idea that the speech stream is divisible into discrete segments. In truth, the ... [ more ]
From the Department of Cheap Research: Melnick’s Thesis. by Woody Ellen. Consider the following data (as they used to say, making it up out of their heads of course): (1a), I want to get married / open a barbershop / buy a horse in my home town. (1b), Therefore I want to get married / open a barbershop / buy a horse. If you want to do something in your home town, then you want to do it, right? Most of the time yes. But: (2a), I want to die in my home town. (2b), *, Therefore I want to die. How come the entailment fails in case (2)? Now there are those who are only hewers of wood and drawers of water, and then there are those who have lambda-abstraction. But it was Mrs. Melnick, down the street, who actually solved ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIV, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Vincent Fish; Associate Editors: Luca Dinu, Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Emily Davis, Andrew Lamont, Gabriel Lanyi; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; The Syntactic Structures of Linguistics; February 2025, ... [ more ]
Letters to the Editor. Dear Editors, I found the recent SpecGram article on the Doom/Punod manuscript fascinating. However, I am amazed that nobody so far has proposed a much more obvious explanation of the mysterious script of the text: it is actually written in the International Phonetic Alphabet! Granted, it does use a lot of obsolete symbols, such as the upside-down t’s and k’s for clicks, but that is to be expected if its origins predate the IPA Kiel Convention of 1989. Of course, this theory leads to an even greater mystery. If the text is indeed an IPA transcription (perhaps inadvertently left by a fieldworker inside a book), what language does it represent? The phoneme inventory suggests that the ... [ more ]
Current Issues in Gastronomy. Elan Dresher and Norbert Hornstein. The mounting rumours that the noted linguist James D. McCawley has written an annotated translation of a Japanese cookbook on oriental cuisine have proven to be well founded. A usually consistent informant has brought it to our attention that a major American publisher is preparing the final galleys, and the author’s students and friends are already hailing it as an “underground classic”. The layman will find much that is new and provocative in this book—for example, the author’s unorthodox theory that all cooking must be done in one pot and that all spices must be present in the pot from the very beginning. However, ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXVIII, Number 2 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Bill Spruiell, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Adam Baker, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Robin Day, Siva Kalyan, Kean Kaufmann, Andrew Lamont, Carin Marais, Tel Monks, Mary Shapiro, Adham Smart, Kien-Wei Tseng, Don Unger; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Improved Razzle (Similar Dazzle); February 2017 ... [ more ]
In the SG-Matrix, There Is No Chaff, Why Author-Level Metrics Are Inadequate. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. I must apologize for inadvertently airing a bit of SpecGram-internal dirty laundry in the last issue, specifically in the article, “The sg-index: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff” prepared by the (now former) SpecGram Data Science Interns. As it was time for decennial performance reviews, the HR department, in the personage of Herr Bestrafung, did in fact request a ranking of performance of various and sundry contributors over the last decade. And while it was a fine and dandy ranking algorithm, and its results were provided, the Data Science Interns made a ... [ 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. Retractions, Rejections and Reconstructions: The Multiply Integrated Lives of Linguistics Texts by Speculative Grammarian Retextualization Editor Reid Rafft Published 2025. 2,328 pages When it comes to texts ... [ more ]
Minimal Forests: The Threat Of Linguistic, Devastation As A Result of Deforestation. GOALS:, The purpose of this paper is to explain the subtle but powerful relationship between language and the environment. We will be using the subtle but powerful method of mathematical induction, and examining the subtle but powerful concept of minimal pairs in establishing phonemic contrasts in a language. EVIDENCE:, Consider the following minimal sets from two totally unrelated languages, Sindhi and Thai: (1), Sindhi, pənu 'leaf', phənu 'snake hood', bənu 'forest', (2), Thai, pàa 'forest', phàa 'to split', bàa 'shoulder', Notice that in both ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXIX, Number 1 ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jonathan Downie, Bill Spruiell, Mikael Thompson, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Adam Baker, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Anita G. Gorman, Siva Kalyan, Tel Monks, Mary Shapiro; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Copula or Null Copula?, That the Question; May 2017 ... [ more ]
Toward a Prophylactic Approach to Techblather: Some Illustrations. Athanasious Schadenpoodle. A: Tactical devices (misuse of specific lexical items). A1 Functionality, as in “Access the program’s advanced functionality!” Motivations: Technical: Function, a quite handy word, was conscripted by mathematicians—a group that combines an admirable respect for precision with an utter disregard for what words already mean and a deep distrust of anything time-bound. The word’s roots in notions of utility were chopped off, its purposive branches trimmed; it was repotted in an abstract relational container. Programmers, whose views of language are quite similar to ... [ 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 ]
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Last updated Feb. 14, 2025.