SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

Move- αnαgrαms II: Historical Edition. by Trey Jones. As noted last time, the joy of Chomsky’s innovative “move-α” was that it freed the language/speaker/linguist/syntactician to move anything, anywhere, at any time, for any reason, as long as doing so didn’t violate any important principles or parameters (with the important ones being those that don’t obviously need to be violated to make one’s theoretical point). In a somewhat more constrained variety of that spirit, we present another Move-αnαgrαms puzzle for your amusement. To solve the puzzle, use all but one of the letters in any of the anagrams, plus one ... [ more ]

Moving Greek Letters. In an earlier paper, “Performance Constraints and Move-α ” I demonstrated conclusively, through the use of a computer model, that the current GB movement theory is inadequate to explain the actual generation of texts of spoken English.¹ Attempts to deal with the problem have been unsuccessful so far.² Indeed, it seems that there is no way to keep Move-α in its present form and still maintain the idea that performance makes use of an underlying competence whose form is dictated by UG. This does not mean, as some of my less enlightened colleagues have suggested, that we should abandon movement rules altogether. The past thirty years have clearly shown, 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. ... Read SpecGram Every Month! ... [ more ]

The “Panama Guzzler” Anagram Puzzle. Trey Jones, l’École de SpecGram, Washington D.C.. You may or may not have noticed something a bit off in the article earlier in this issue by Barb Tyd-Laika and Tessie Chopp Durnford, entitled “The Nasal Tone: An Honest Tale”. If you did, then either you are very sensitive to nuanced subtleties of language, or you are just really paranoid.¹ If not, you obviously have all the finesse of a rock thrown through a plate glass window. In any event, the text is indeed special. It is what I like to call a “Panama Guzzler” Anagram Puzzle. Now, even if you are a little dim, you may have noticed that panama guzzler is an anagram of ... [ more ]

Introducing Sadian, Context, phoneme inventory and promissory notes. April Füller, Department of Linguistics, University of Moose Jaw^*. 1. Introduction This paper is intended as the first of a series on the Sadian language. Desdashpvk [ d̠ə.ˈsad.ʃpvk ] (the endonym for the language) is spoken by a community of about 350 people in three valleys of the central Caucasus.¹ It is apparently a linguistic isolate, although Spume (2012) proposes a link to the Mongolic family. All speakers of Sadian speak at least two other languages; Georgian is the most popular second language for Sadophones, and is viewed as “easy to learn.” 1.1. Typological characteristics Sadian has ... [ more ]

A Proposal for Introducing the Progressive, Ancient JGHAR Practice to Increase Mental Stability and Productivity within the Linguistics Community. by Prof. P. Grimes XXVII, with invaluable unsolicited advice from Dr J. Doe . Much has been written¹ about the problems surrounding workplace stress, work/life balance, and productivity² across various industries. However, research around the need for change within the Linguistics Community have been severely lacking; a result of the vast majority of linguists not showing much interest in the corners of the internet filled with the so-called “PBIs”³, and therefore not realising that they are in need of ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. A Plea For Decency Linguistics has gone bad, and we need to do something about it. Our discipline is riddled with sinful words like syntax, syndeton, synthetic, and crude innuendos such as genitival, clitic, deictic, and dangling participles. Is it a mere happenstance that durative sounds like the name of a condom? No, it is not. It is a deliberate attempt to vulgarise the field of linguistics by gaudy grammarians after having spent too many nights at X-Bars. These all too obvious attempts at sexualising our discipline must be stopped. It is a moral crime to allow innocent, pure students to be bombarded with such tawdry terms as ... [ more ]

Why Princes are not Scribes, and the Rat Eats Grain. Solvi T. Perverbum, Institute of Euphratic Studies of the University of Nueva Escranton. with invaluable assistance from, Allen Halfermain, L. E. A. and, Bess Paryadok, Foreign Languages Dept. of the University of Latverya Dear _______— My research team has been excavating the site of a city of the Kenduzandi culture, a group whose florescence occurred during the late third millenium somewhat northwest of Girsu. As with some of their better-known neighbors, like the Elamites and the Gutians, they were distinct from the Sumerians and Akkadians but were earlier drawn into the orbit of the Uruk Expansion. We’ve been working for some time on ... [ 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 ]

Preliminary Studies in the Lexicology of Imaginary Language. By Dr. I.R. Superordinate, Chair of Recently Recovered Research, Department of Futile Linguistics, University of Jealleybeane, Hluhluwe, Republic of South Africa. Following on the preliminary preliminary studies of the late Dr. A. Pímpel (1938), on the increasing number of usages of Imaginary language, I henceforth wish to elaborate and make known to the esteemed world of linguistics this new field of study within the linguistic arena. Language, as Spoken by Linguists — After losing the cursor on the display: “Oops—you know why it’s called the cursor.”, For those uninformed readers who are inclined to ... [ more ]

Son of Lingua Pranca. T. Ernst & E. Smith, Editors. Indiana University. IULC. November 1979. ... edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging edging, ... Son of, ^ Lingua, ... Pranca, ... fleur ... T. Ernst & E. Smith, eds. ... indiana university, ... i u linguistics club, ... [ more ]

Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome . Are you looking for a book about ancient Roman history that’s interesting, informative, and amusing? No? Oh. Well, all the same, as long as you’re on this webpage already, we’d like to recommend that you buy Tim Pulju’s The History of Rome. Easy to read, full of genuine historical facts, and adorned with amateurish hand-drawn pictures, The History of Rome is so good that even Girolamo Savonarola might hesitate to cast it into the flames. And best of all, it’s only $6.99! Buy one now! Interested, but wary of being burned by a slick advertising campaign for a product that fails to live up to the hype? Then download the free preview and read ... [ more ]

A Survey of Linguistic Contributions to Modern Iocology. Grivet Malbrouck, Professor of Iocology, Milne-Edwards University, Mangabey, Australia. The experimental study of the psychology of fun, iocology, has taken enormous strides forward since the latter half of the 20^th century. A multidisciplinary field little known by outsiders, iocology nonetheless presents the spectacle of specialists in several of the human sciences collaborating in overcoming prima facie insurmountable methodological challenges to offer unexpected vistas into human psychology. The Fundamentals of Iocology and Iocometry. Fun is measured in units of sims, with one sim equivalent to an hour’s exposure to one macaque monkey ... [ 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 ]

Further Land-Grabbing in the Left Periphery. Tel Monks, Student Emeritus. Modern syntacticians agree that the Left Periphery is ripe for further development since the territory was opened up by such luminaries as Rizzi (1997).ⁱ This paper states (stakes?) a new claim based on my extensive syntactic field studies in the Funny Pages. The Washington Post (April 9th, 2019), inter alia, published an episode of the Judge Parkerⁱⁱ strip including the following panel: I was naturally struck by the question from Sam Driver: “l can do what now?” This is clearly a wh-question presenting the required substitution of a wh-word for the Object NP; however, the ... [ more ]

In this study we explore how the linguist interacts with a wide range of structural variability by simulating not only the behavior of the trees themselves but also the behavior of the linguist. ... [ more ]

Arabic Numeral to Numeri++ Converter. by Daniel Swanson & Trey Jones. Cognomen 2018 (SpecGram, CLXXX.3) in footnote ‡‡† lays out “a superior, novel solution” to extending Numeri++, his science-nerd–friendly upgrade to Roman numerals, to accommodate values beyond 5,000. Below we provide a handy converter^† for the mathematically and/or typographically challenged among you who would like to use this system — ^† It appears that our buddy Prae-Prae put a little too much faith in the Unicode Consortium. Obviously any entity with “Consortium” right there in the name is not to be trusted fully. The biggest problem is that ... [ more ]

Great Linguistics Movies and Their Famous Lines—Part II. The SpecGram Editorial Board. It’s surprising how many of today’s youth are unfamiliar with the Classics of Linguistic Film. And while these fickle youth are unlikely to actually take the time to watch—much less have the cultural sophistication necessary to appreciate—these films, perhaps they will gain something from acquainting themselves with their most important and oft-repeated lines. Part I of the collection was published in the last issue. “Data? We ain’t got no data! We don’t need no data! I don’t have to show you any stinking data!” —The Theory of the ... [ more ]

It Is Interesting to Note: Best Practices for Scholarly Writing in All Disciplines. Gabriel Lanyi^*. Abstract Emoticons were designed to express in one glyph a rich cognitive-emotional reaction at a time when readers’ span of attention is approaching epsilon. Since the style guides of most scholarly journals do not recommend the use of emoticons, researchers were induced to develop new modes of expression to promptly convey complex scientific data to the busy reader. The best practices reveal some of the more productive techniques emerging in the literature. * * *. With the exponential growth in scholarship, there are now more articles in every field than hours in the lives of their ... [ 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 ]

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