SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP. Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. Please review previously discussed materials as needed. Now that that is taken care of, let us consider why Natural Language Processing (or, its alter-ego, Computational Linguistics) has not been the resounding success regularly predicted by the NLP faithful: We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry/over-ripe. Time/Fruit flies like a(n) arrow/banana. pretty little girl’s school crying computational linguist Up next: Lexicostatistics vs Glottochronology. References, Baeza-Yates, Ricardo and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information ... [ more ]

A Love/Hate Relationship: Pesky Antonyms. Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University. When students get to college, the majority of them have never thought about antonyms as being anything more than “opposites.” So big is the opposite of small, just like buyer is the opposite of seller. Then, all of a sudden, students are forced into a linguistics course with a professor who tells them that they have to learn to differentiate among different types of antonyms. Student’s minds are nearly exploding with information as they have to learn definitions of terms like ‘converse’ and ‘gradable’ and ‘complementary’ in the world of ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Youth Research Focus is proud to bring you the finest language-related research by the world’s school-aged youth. Grey Duck or Goose?, Mapping variation in a children’s game in Minnesota. Fifth Grade Science Fair Project, by Sven Slater and Ollie Bickford, J. O. Nelson Public School, St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Research Question. Last year, a new kid named Tyler P. joined our fourth grade class. Tyler was from Illinois or some other southern state, and she told us that down there kids play “duck, duck, goose,” instead of “duck, duck, grey duck” like we do here in Minnesota. We thought this was strange, even for the South, but then we ... [ more ]

Neo-Latin and Craft Latin: Recent Trends in Rival Latinitates. Fletcher Bowyer Scrugg, Social Columnist for The Philological Weekly. “Classical Latin: First the Romans killed it, then the medievals worshipped its bastard offspring, then the Renaissance robbed its tomb and embalmed it, and finally the 19^th century philologists dissected it and shelved the samples in the less healthsome sections of the library.” Raising a glass of unwatered wine, Grumby Kerr Mudgin added, “It is my job to revive the blessed thing whole and hearty,” and drained his glass in one go. I had met Mr. Mudgin in the course of researching reactions to the publication of the second half of the ... [ more ]

Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics. by Trey Jones. As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been. Let the adventure begin ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT Seeking Part-Time Adjunct Professor of Tuxedo Textile Technologies/Statistics of Tactical Syntax. The Technical University of Texas is fixin’ to appoint a part-time Adjunct Professor of Tuxedo Textile Technologies/Statistics of Tactical Syntax. A 0.8 FTE role divided equally between the two main job responsibilities, the successful candidate will get the job. Position Responsibilities. Required Tuxedo Textiles Technologies, As a 24/7/52/365 tuxedo wearer, you will kindly be comfortable wearing all kinds of tuxedos in whatever kind of tuxedo-wearing contexts. You will demonstrate a nuanced grasp of the technicalities of tuxedo textiles, preferably with a penchant for, ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian. Volume CXLVII, Number 1. January 1993. Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXLVII, No 1 EDITOR, Tim Pulju ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Trey Jones, Aya Katz, Rob Norris, Don Reindl, Lynn Poulton, Keith Slater, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES, Dave Kathman, Bill Spruiell, DUKE, DUKE, DUKE, Duke of, Earl, Earl, Earl, ... [ 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 two trigrams removed. Below are two separate puzzles. Each includes a table to fill out and a set of trigrams with which to fill it up. Using each trigram 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. CHA, ___, ___, MOM, ___, ___, DIS, ___, ___, IDI, ___, ___, PHO, ___, ___, PAR, ___, ___, TEX, ___, ___, SCR, ___, ___, HAI, ___, ___, ALA, ARY, ENT, GED, LIA, NAT, OGY, OMA, ORY, OUN, RAC, RST, SOL, TER, TIC, TOL, UTE, YLE, ___, RIN, ___, ___, NED, ___, ___, ... [ more ]

SpecGram, Quarterly. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. [Note: Due to a scheduling error⁰ 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 ]

In Defense of Capitalism. Adora Urbano, PhD, Professor of Linguistics, University of Constantinople. A spectre is haunting linguistics—the spectre of capitalism. For far too long, the field of dialectology has been dominated by a research program focusing exclusively on NORMs (non-mobile older rural males): under the pretense that the speech of such informants is more conservative and thus more valuable for linguistic science than that of inhabitants of capital cities, anti-capitalist linguists such as van der Dorp have focused exclusively on rural speakers, with the result being blatant discrimination against, and a dearth of data on the speech of, speakers living in capital cities. The primary ... [ more ]

The /bɪɡɪnɪŋ/ of the /ɛnd/, A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. Automagically Transcribed℠ by the, LingTechCo Dictaphonemizer 3.1™. T.J.: (yelling) Mr. Ó McBar van der Fitzez del Abבןsønовичόπουλescu ǃ Mr. Ó McBar van der Fitzez del Abבןsønовичόπουλescu ǃ I can’t figure out how to get this new-fangled Dictaphonemizer to turn on. I already wrangled a one-month extension and I still don’t have anything for my editorial, which ... [ more ]

Rasmus Rask Puzzle II, Rasmus vs Ethnologue!, by Lila Rosa Grau This is the second 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 the diagonal are given to provide a framework for filling in the ... [ more ]

Greek Particles. Two facts well-known to linguists for many years are that Ancient Greek orthography represented speech much more closely than does modern English orthography, or practically any other modern European orthography, and that speech, unlike writing, is full of hesitations, false starts, and meaningless expletive utterances which are not recorded in writing. For instance, In English, a typical spoken text might be: Well, it’s the, umm... you know, the one that, uh, you got from the store across the street. We can make a number of interesting observations about the meaningless expletives in the above and in similar texts, of which the interested reader can collect many more examples, if he is so inclined. The ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CLXXX, Number 1 Special Teaching Issue I, Sponsored by Rosetta Stein ... Trey Jones, Editor-in-Chief; Keith Slater, Executive Editor; Associate Editors: Pete Bleackley, Jonathan Downie, Mikael Thompson; Assistant Editors: Virginia Bouchard, Mark Mandel, Yuval Wigderson; Editorial Associates: Brenda Boerger, Florian Breit, Bethany Carlson, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Vincent Fish, Anita G. Gorman, Beth Martyn, Tel Monks, Mary Shapiro, Bill Spruiell, Don Unger, Sheri Wells-Jensen; Joey Whitford, Comptroller General; Trinken Sie Bier, zum gut studier!; November 2017 ... [ more ]

Rasmus Rask Puzzle XIII— Dam Homophones!. by Lila Rosa Grau. This is the thirteenth 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 the diagonal are given to provide a framework ... [ more ]

Overheard^* in the Linguistics Student Lounge. Chesterton “ T͡ʃazː ” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV, Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers^**, Third-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton All names have been changed to protect the ~~guilty~~ innocent. Preterite: It occurs to me that when used literally, pointed and blunt are opposites, but when used metaphorically, they mean the same thing. It strikes me that the opposite of contronym ought to be contronym. Keysmith: Ah, something to include in our next list, “terms that ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIV, Number 4 Preantepenultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Vincent Fish, Luca Dinu; Associate Editors: Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Emily Davis, Carin Marais, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; Putting the /d͡ʒʌŋk/ in “Conjunctions”; July 2025, ... [ more ]

Polyglot Derivatives— Part II. Paul E. and Polly Glōttidēs, X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. But this florescent multilingualism isn’t your grandfather’s old “two languages and a spare”. No, as the richness of humans’ relationships to one another (and to the entire created order) continues to entwickeln, new varieties of multilingualism are constantly arising. No longer can the simple term polyglot be expected to represent the full diversity of human linguistic competence. Unfortunately, English vocabulary (unlike Eskimo vocabulary), hasn’t even made a pretense of keeping up. Each and every day a new form of ... [ more ]

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