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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 ]

L’Ishing du Gwujlang. by Dorothea Dorfman and Theodora Mundorf, with additional assistance from Lini Nealey and Lucia Chaloux. Introduction Even minimally informed linguists and serious amateurs will be aware of verlan (from Fr. l’envers), the French reverse-syllable argot. Fewer will, however, know of a similar secretive cant based on English, and reportedly used by members of a splinter group of the Original English Movement. In keeping with the re-spelled pattern of verlan, this jargon is known as l’ishing. Unlike verlan, however, l’ishing users prefer words that map onto one another when some portion of the sounds at the end of a given word are moved to the ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

We Got One Wet, And Now They Are Multiplying, Letters from All of the Editors. (Please don’t feed the editors after midnight.) On Herding Cats, with Managing Editor Trey Jones In celebration of Canada Day,¹ we are pleased to present this special Canadian Edition of Speculative Grammarian, which features better socialized healthcare, cheaper medications, and an undervalued currency, but without much of a distinctive culture. We have waited to honor the greatest Canadian linguist of all time, Leonard Bloomfield,² on the cover of this special issue. Also, as I am much too busy to write anything worthy of this space this time, I’ve asked each of the other editors⁶ ... [ more ]

From the Archives!—SpecGram Propaganda XIII. The SpecGram Archive Elves™. A recent expedition into the SpecGram archives turned up 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. This thirteenth batch of posters from that collection has been digitized and presented here for you, dear reader, to enjoy, retrospect on, and share. The full collection, which will continue to grow, is available from the SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda in an easily browsable and sharable ... [ more ]

Ancillary 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 12th 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 morphemes and word formation. Neologisms mean that those created words do not exist. The meaning of re- as to verb again in ‘redo’ is not kept in rebeautiful. The addition of a suffix as in -ful (e.g. beautiful) ... [ more ]

LingDoku—Like SuDoku, But For Linguists. Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Washington D.C.. The Japanese number/logic game SuDoku ... has become all the rage around the globe of late, and in a shameless attempt to cash in on that popularity, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to concoct a SuDoku-like activity for Linguists. Traditional SuDoku requires a certain amount of logical reasoning and subtle consideration of the evidence which many linguists probably find time-consuming, labor-intensive, and boring. LingDoku simplifies the logical components of SuDoku, and introduces a thin veneer of linguistics which confuses outsiders while making linguists feel superior. The rules of ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXVII, Number ο ... Speculative Grammarian, in association with Psammeticus Press, is proud to present a special supplemental monograph: The Texas World Cultural Festival and Poetry Recitation Competition, by Damian Grammatical, Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief, Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Mikael Thompson, Monograph Editor, The Texas World Cultural Festival and Poetry Recitation Competition; Mid-October 2016 ... [ more ]

On the Mytholinguistic Significance of Butterflies. Mary Hadlitt-Lamb, Grimm Institute of Folkloristics. A remarkable cross-linguistic pattern can be observed in the words for butterfly. While these words seldom appear to be cognate even in closely related languages, they are surprisingly similar between apparently unrelated languages. In practically all languages studied, they exhibit at least one of the following features: The presence of at least one bilabial sound, and usually more. The reduplication of some phonological material within the word. A few examples will serve to illustrate this, Latin, papilio, Japanese, chouchou, Hebrew, parpar, Georgian, vavela, Hawaiian, ... [ more ]

Amateur Hour at the Minas Morgul All-Ages Dance Club. From Elven Clones and Epigones to Quidditch Drones and Drudge of Thrones . by Artemus Zebulon Pratt, Editor-on-the-Lam. Recently of an evening, having finally gotten a break from the profound joys of proofreading symbolic logic in T E X format (but then, once you’ve mastered cuneiform, anything is easy), I shook my head as I finished editing a collective academic crawl that would have to find its feet before it could even be classified as pedestrian, comprising a whole congeries of jeremiatribes on the evil taint on English prose that is Tolkien. “Unclean! Unclean!” it shouted from every line, and one could tell the ... [ more ]

A Preliminary Field Guide to Linguists, Part Two. Athanasious Schadenpoodle, University of Nueva Escranton. Introduction The previous installment, dealing with Neoplatonicus and Functionalisticus, comprised a brief discussion of the less problematic genera in the family--less problematic in the sense that their grouping is not contested among those working in this area. This section will deal with two groups whose taxonomic status is a matter of quite some debate; to a large extent, the groupings presented should be taken as tentative, and done largely for the sake of organized presentation (cf. Gnibbes 1998 and Czechzindemeyl 1999 for representative positions on grouping of these ... [ more ]

Speech is an Elaborate Cover for Widespread Telepathy. Will Styler, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vowels. Abstract. This article challenges the long-standing “Speech” theory of language: that humans communicate by flapping around bits of meat in their heads and necks, thus creating minute and highly speaker-specific patterns of vibration in air pressure, and then interpreting these vibrations, via little bones and tiny hair cells, as referent to concepts, entities, and propositions in the greater world. In place of this overly-complex and increasingly implausible theory, the author proposes a far simpler species-wide telepathic link, with “speech” serving primarily ... [ more ]

SPhLiMTic Glimpses—A Partial Transcript from the Session on Inchoative Hypothetical Confluences of Σύμφωνον-Φωνῆεν Transference, Part VIII of XXIX, held during The 2018 Symposium on Philologic and Linguistic Meta-Theorogenisis. SPhLiMT High Committee of Beneficent Overseers. The Symposium on Philologic and Linguistic Meta-Theorogenisis (SPhLiMT) is a semisesquiquinquennial meeting of over 2500 philologic and linguistic Global Thought Leaders (GTLs) who gather to discuss global stimulus poverty, political uptalk, climate-induced sound change, and whatever else keeps them up at night. The ideas and concepts discussed at ... [ 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 ]

Verbal Arithmetic. by Fnu Nmn Lnu, A.B.D. University of Bally-Go-Backwards, Ireland. This puzzle is worth 9 points. Each of the ten letters in the equations below stands for a digit, from 0 to 9. Find the mapping from letters to digits that makes all three equations true. GRAVE VAGUE TUTOR, +ACUTE + RARE +ANGER, CARON COVEN ENACT, ... [ 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 ]

Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know, (because they aren’t actually true), Book VII, gathered at great personal risk of, psycholinguistic harm from actual student tests, by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira This seventh collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written test answers, 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. Test question. Suppose you are in a food market and you overhear a conversation between a customer and a stall-holder behind you. The customer says: I’ll take these chillies and that bunch of ... [ more ]

Word Search. by Marco Manni Quadi-Suebi, Istwäonen Professor für Verschiebeprobe, Weglaßbarkeit, und Ersatzprobe, und, Al P. Engermanen, Ingwäonen Dozent für Konsonantenverdoppelung, Universität Bavaria This puzzle is worth 6 points. Find the listed words in the table of letters. Identify any word or words in the list that are not also in the table. ... Mars Linguists—Prof. Yamātārājabhānasalagām Ouroboros, ... Drop Kick the Quote—Phil Trum, Doctor of Linguology, ... SpecGram Vol CLVII, No η Contents, ... [ more ]

The Origin of Tonal Consonants in Native American Languages. Iain Paul Anderson, Junior Data Scientist (FTC), Munich University Deep Diachronic Linguistics Experiment. While preparing data from a sample of Native American languages for mass lexical comparison, I noticed a curious feature of the phonology of these languages. We normally expect tone to occur on vowels, but a large number of the languages in the sample contained consonants marked for tone. It was always the same four consonants on which tonal marking occurred—the palatal stop and approximant, and the alveolar fricatives, and they always contrasted rising tone against unmarked—no other tone was marked on these consonants, nor were ... [ more ]

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