SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 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 ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CXCV, Number 3; February 2026, C HIEF C AT H ERDER &, A RBITER OF THE L AST W ORD, Trey Jones, O RDER OF THE, S PECULATIVE P SAMMETICOI, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, Tim Pulju, Bill Spruiell, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXCV, No 3, H EAD OF L EARNING, L INGUISTICS T HROUGH, S ATIRE AND P UNS, Jonathan Downie, S YNTACTICO- P OET &, U NDER- E DITOR OF, U NDER- E DITING, Deak Kirkham, S ENIOR P UZZLING, T EST P ILOT, Vincent Fish, K EEPER OF THE, E DITORIAL T EA C ADDY, Pete Bleackley, A SSOCIATE D EPUTY, A SSISTANT S UB- M ANAGER, OF S ATIRICAL S UCCESS, Luca Dinu, O RTHOGRAPHER- A T- L ARGE, Daniel Swanson, D ILETTANTE E MERITUS, Tel ... [ 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. ... Read SpecGram Every Month! ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian. Volume CXLIX, Number 1. January 2004. Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXLIX, No 1 EDITOR, Trey Jones EDITOR EMERITUS, Tim Pulju ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Jesse Beach, Aya Katz, Sérgio Meira, Don Reindl, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Keith Slater, John Newell, Dave Fleck, All Your Morpheme Are Belong To Us, ... [ more ]

The C-Rhyme and Pun-ish-ment of St. Alvin. by Jerry Fyodor & Josef Dobrovskýevsky. It is now commonly accepted that St. Alvin was always accompanied by an assistant called Theodorus. Theodorus was a budding philosopher, with interests in Kant, Hegel and innateness in generative grammar. He was however, very rotund and was therefore known as the Deep Fat Friar. As a young monk, St Alvin left his first monastery, where he had taken a vow of silence, to found an order that believed that people were best served by creating attractive paper to put around Christmas gifts. It is for this reason that his autobiography was entitled “From Trappist to Wrappist.” The members of that order were noted for their ... [ more ]

On Pseudo-Psiblings^*, A Good Start in Need of Significant Linguistic Improvements, Which We Have Undertaken and Are Here to Report On. Fillastre Pèl-Roig,^a Belle-Fille Rousse,^b Hijastro Pelirrojo,^c Rauðaz Khæran Steupa-Kiltham,^a^b Rotkopf Stiefkind,^a^c Punatukkainen Tytärpuoli,^b^c and Vörös Hajú Mostohagyerek^a^b^c. with begrudgingly acknowledged & extremely minor input from Trey Jones^z^Ω^☣ Well That’s Dumb. For the last 19.4 years, those of us with the ... [ more ]

Do You Suffer the Embarrassment of Loose Vowel Syndrome?. Dr. Goodword. It is an affliction so embarrassing that no one wants to talk about it, yet it is spreading like Harry Potter books throughout the English-speaking world. The symptoms are slurred speech, confusion, misunderstood utterances. By now you’ve guessed it: I am writing about Loose Vowel Syndrome (LVS). LVS involves the loosening of unaccented vowels until they drop out of words completely! The origin of LVS is clearly Merry Old England, where Worcester has been worn down to Wooster, library is pronounced libr’y, and laboratory is laborat’ry (lab’ratory in the U.S.) How many young men have seen their naval ... [ more ]

Thirteen Untranslatable Words. by Michael Covarrubias. I’m a language lover. I have been since I was a kid. Just about eleven months after being born, I started saying words and I’ve been using them ever since. I probably use words every day and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. After a while, we language lovers have a hard time learning more about our native language. That’s why we branch out to memorize other languages. It can be hard though, because a lot of foreign languages have words in them that we just can’t translate into English. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the concept in English, and that makes it impossible to make up a label for the concept. Or, more interestingly, ... [ more ]

Previous Puzzle Solutions. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. The solution to last issue’s final^* domino-themed puzzle, Scriptominoes IV—Brāhmī’s Revenge, is presented here. The script categories—color-coded for your delight and elucidation—are Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, and Tibetan. Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch of their choosing: Cindy Almond • Emma Čapková • Lachlan Turner Good work! — The solutions to last issue’s puzzle, Mix & Match ‖‖ are ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLXIII, Number 3; December 2011, PestSchrift for Trey Jones, on the Occasion of his Non-Retirement, EDITORS-IN-THIEF, A Bunch of Hassled Editors, and Other SpecGram Lurkers and Loungers, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXIII, No 3, “The most lasting thing from my, linguistics education is SpecGram..”, ... [ more ]

BABEL. ... The Journal of the Worldwide Linguistic Society, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, Tim Pulju, BOARD OF EDITORS, David Dwyer, Douglas S. Files, Eugene Gagliano, C.F. Hockett, David Kathman, James McCawley, David G. Lockwood, C.F. Meyer, Carol Miller, Lynn Poulton, Fu Qiying, Keith Slater, Walter Spitz, William C. Spruiell, Insun Yang, Zhang Jian-nan, ... [ more ]

“Double-Dot Wide O / Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill” by J–––– J––––––. From Speculative Grammarian CLI.3; July 2006. Reviewed by Jonathan van der Meer. ... Double-Dot Wide O, Spoiler Alert !. It’s been more than eight years, so I’m going to go ahead and let you in on a little secret: the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill is a pig snort, and the double-dot wide O looks like a pig snout. (Some phoneticians will argue that they themselves produce a uvular trill. They probably do—especially when reading journals less interesting than SpecGram—but ... [ more ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLXIV, Number 1; February 2012, MANAGING EDITOR Trey Jones SENIOR EDITOR Keith Slater EDITOR EMERITUS Tim Pulju Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXIV, No 1 CONSULTING EDITORS David J. Peterson Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Daniela Müller Mikael Thompson, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Bryan Allen Cem Bozsahin Jonathan Downie Aya Katz Jouni Maho Kevin McGowan Tel Monks Sheri Wells-Jensen, COMPTROLLER GENERAL Joey Whitford I Can Has Kasemarker? ... [ 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 ]

Letters to the Editor, double-dot wide-o To the most respected Editors, In the fall I’ll be a first-year grad student in linguistics at R––– University. A couple of the current fourth-years told me that the International Phonetic Association was adding several new symbols for sounds that have previously been considered to have questionable status as phonemes. They said that the most contentious new addition was double-dot wide-O, a nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill. I’ve leafed through several back issues of SpecGram, Language, and a few other journals. I’ve searched the Linguist List archives, and scoured the web. I can’t find anything about it ... [ 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 ]

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLXII, Number 1; June 2011, MANAGING EDITOR, SENIOR EDITOR, EDITOR EMERITUS, Trey Jones, Keith Slater, Tim Pulju, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXII, No 1, CONSULTING EDITORS, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Jouni Maho, Daniela Müller, David J. Peterson, Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Jeff, Burke, Christine, Collins, Bethany Carlson, Kevin, McGowan, Freya Shipley, Sheri Wells-Jensen, COMPTROLLER GENERAL, Joey Whitford, Every time you conjugate... God kills a kitten, ... [ more ]

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