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1. Archives (59 visits)

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 ]


2. “Double-Dot Wide O / Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill”—by J–––– J––––––—Reviewed by Jonathan van der Meer (33 visits)

“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 ]


3. Review of Lily Brown’s review of 张红宾的 review of 李丽丽的 review of Roger J. Smith’s Reported Speech in Chinese-英语 Codeswitching—Reviewed by Shr Ji Wei (15 visits)

Review of Lily Brown’s review of 张红宾的 review of 李丽丽的 review of Roger J. Smith’s Reported Speech in Chinese-英语 Codeswitching. Reviewed by Shr Ji Wei, SpecGram Institute of Obfuscational Linguistics. Brown asserts that 他说她主张 that Smith’s major claim was that 汉语-English codeswitching is fundamentally a change of stance. 乱讲！ Her 观点完全没意思， as he points out that 她已经证明了 that he 实际上 claimed codeswitching 只 is a realignment of ... [ more ]


4. Draw Me a Linguist—Aster E. O’Gnosis and Margo Llicso (15 visits)

Draw Me a Linguist. Aster E. O’Gnosis and Margo Llicso. Much has been made recently in certain circles of the stereotypical views children have of scientists, and how those views are changed after paying a visit to CERN—all reflected in the drawings of the children. (Drollette, 2010) The cliché says that children are our future, and the humanizing effect of the CERN visit on children’s perceptions may eventually be parlayed into an increase in the number of young people who choose to pursue science as a profession, which of course results in better enrollment in college courses, and thus more funding for science departments. We figured linguistics could probably use some of that action, too. ... [ more ]


5. Quipley’s Don’t Believe It! ... Or Do? (14 visits)

Quipley’s Don’t Believe It! ... Or Do? Legend has it that Frank Quipley once sent his nephew Josh on a trip with expensive audio recording equipment to document “one of those Australian languages, it doesn’t matter which one.” Josh returned weeks later, tanned, rested, and reeking of lager.1 When Frank got around to listening to the tapes, he could barely hear anything. Suspecting faulty equipment, he asked Josh to give him a verbal description of the language he chose to investigate. Josh replied, “So, in Auslan...” This month, Josh reports on a language he claims to have heard about via a friend in another department. Josh filled in some of the linguistic details, no doubt ... [ more ]


6. Saban Restructures Contract—SpecGram Wire Services (13 visits)

Saban Restructures Contract, Becomes Nation’s Highest-Paid Linguist. SpecGram Wire Services. Nick Saban, head linguist at the University of Alabama, has been rewarded for his recursive series of successful seasons with a newly-restructured contract. The deal will pay Saban an average of $7.3 million per year over 23 years. Performance bonuses would allow Saban to earn up to an additional $1.2 million per year. Barring offseason deals for other prominent linguists, the deal makes Saban the highest-paid college linguist in the United States. Humanities Director James Grant Carmichael II described Saban’s new contract as both “functional” and “generative,” and as ... [ more ]


7. Ədvɚtəs’mənts (13 visits)

ADVERTISEMENTS Ədvɚtəs’mənts. Feeling stressed? Wound up? Anxious? Overworked? With our Get Schwa Get Fit 6-week programme, we’ll have you de-stressing your vowel articulation in no time—and muscle tension, back pain and headaches will quickly melt away.. • ° ə ə ° •. Are you a civil engineer, erecting multi-storey buildings on and around tectonic plate boundaries? With our patented Schw-Architecture system, you can test the stress resistance of any car park, hotel, commercial skyscraper or runway simply by articulating unstressed mid-central vowels in the direction of the concrete.. ... [ more ]


8. Hippotomia of Tyre—The Phreeee-Phinkin’ Philosophers of Philologogia and The SpecGram Encyclopedia of Linguistic Deities (12 visits)

Hippotomia of Tyre. Presented by, The Phreeee-Phinkin’ Philosophers of Philologogia, and The SpecGram Encyclopedia of Linguistic Deities . Who can forget the goddess Hippotomia of Tyre, the ancient Syrian Goddess of wh-movement? Anthropologists of religion see her as originally a horse deity, with material cultural artefacts from the 3rd millennium BC depicting her as seated astride a magnificent four-headed horse and consuming custard slices. However, with the shift of ancient Syrian from a wh-in situ language to a wh-fronted language, her divine roles and responsibilities gradually shifted to encompass these aspects of the language. At the peak of her popularity, she was honored ... [ more ]


9. Optimal Divinity and Divine Optimality: Key Points of Difference in DUG and OT—Athanasious Schadenpoodle (12 visits)

Optimal Divinity and Divine Optimality: Key Points of Difference in DUG and OT. By Athanasious Schadenpoodle. Both Divine Unification Grammar (henceforth DUG; adumbrated by Garcia 1990) and Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) represent attempts to simultaneously maintain claims for universals and for meaningful language particulars. DUG does so, of course, by positing a language-transcendent pantheon, the members of which are not always in agreement, and the collective judgments of whom, therefore, can vary over specific languages.1 OT approaches the same problem by positing violable universal constraints, the ranking of importance of which varies from language to language. Essentially (and these ... [ more ]


10. Letters to the Editor (CLXXXIV.2) (12 visits)

Letters to the Editor. Dear sirs/ma’ams, In your recent NewsNibble, your reporter wrote regarding E-Prime, “The English variant, in which all forms of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ are eliminated to try to improve clarity and reduce discrimination...” and added that “Experts at EnPhoWahrs University have pointed out that a similar, albeit less-restrictive, version of the rule is in existence in Russian...” Please note that while Russian doesn’t have a copula in the present (it does in the past and future), it does have a verb of existence, есть. It also does have a verb of possession, иметь as ... [ more ]


11. Συυιτχεροο—Βῆτα—Ἔλλειψις Ἀστερίσκος and Ἔλλειψις Ἀπόστροφος (12 visits)

Συυιτχεροο—Βῆτα. by Ἔλλειψις Ἀστερίσκος and Ἔλλειψις Ἀπόστροφος. In this second puzzle of letter switcheroos, your task is—for each pair of words below—to form two new words by swapping one letter from each word, which will generally result in new words that are more appropriate for a SpecGram audience. For example, starting with fictive / faction, you can ... [ more ]


12. SpecGram Dictionary of the Linguistics of Mythological Beasts—Volume 123: The Vampire—B. Summers & T. Belmont (12 visits)

SpecGram Dictionary of the Linguistics of Mythological Beasts . It’s Not Just Legendary; It’s Unreal . Volume 123: The Vampire, by B. Summers & T. Belmont. “I vant to suck your blood!” is a phrase that has become synonymous with these blood-sucking creatures in popular culture. Vampires have been an essential part of literature and folklore for centuries. From the pale-skinned Count Dracula to the sparkling Edward Cullen, vampires have taken many forms through the years. The mythological creature known as the vampire has many morphological and lexical potentialities lurking in the shadows. We have organized the following based on the phases of a blood moon to guide you on ... [ more ]


13. How Do I Love Thee?—Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram—Alex Savoy (12 visits)

How Do I Love Thee?, Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram. Alex Savoy. [Author’s Note: Quite in fitting with the approach of Valentine’s Day, I submit this love poem, which, surprisingly, actually worked—though alas I am no longer dating said person anymore, which is why I am bitterly prostituting this former declaration of love, which I have suitably altered for the occasion.] How do I love thee? Let me draw a tree diagram— I was maundering, lonely as a bilabial trill, When I first heard your voice—(some breathy strange tongue), I was love-struck at once—(after all, I was young), How rounded your mouth, And iotally perfect your skin. Your eyes are like geminates, plosive and clear, ... [ more ] Podcast! Book!


14. Review of Pulju’s An Optimality-Theoretic Account of the History of Linguistics: Past, Present, Future—TJP (12 visits)

Book Review. Pulju, Timothy. 2006. An Optimality-Theoretic Account of the History of Linguistics: Past, Present, Future. Lanzhou, China: Psammeticus Press.. It is a great sorrow to those of us who remember the glory days of Psammeticus Press—those fabled days when it was the leading linguistics publisher in the world—nay, what is more, in the entire history of the world—it is, I repeat, a great sorrow to us to witness the depths to which the beloved imprint has sunk with the publication of this lamentable volume. What could have possessed PsPress’s current chairman K. Winnipesaukee Slater III, a meek man, to be sure, and mild, but still a reputable scholar, and ... [ more ] Podcast!


15. The Conlanger’s Pasta Machine—Advertisement (12 visits)

ADVERTISEMENT Cooking up a conlang? Tired of the same old configurational lasagne and non-configurational spaghetti? You need... The Conlanger’s Pasta Machine. Soon you’ll be able to create all the fashionable conlang shapes, to the amazement of your friends. Why not try...? Ergativiti Binds to your sauce in a completely different way. Monovalenci With its long, elegant chains. Triconsonanti Perfect with arabiatta sauce. Alveolini Gives your conlang a sound best described as al dente. Polysynthetti So many long, thick strings of lexical material your mouth won’t know what to do with it all! Dothracci Delicious with horsemeat bolognese (available ... [ more ]


16. Recursive Processing: An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Benhirloŋtam—Claude Searsplainpockets (12 visits)

Speculative Grammarian is proud to present yet another irregular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment's Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. Recursive Processing: An Anthropological, Linguistic Study of the Benhirloŋtam0, Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 55. Background, The Benhirloŋtam live in a world that can best be described as fractal. The mountain range visible on the horizon is oddly regular, and any piece of it looks like a smaller version of the whole thing. A sketch is shown in Figure 1 below: ... Figure 1. A sketch of mountains visible from the village. The Benhirloŋtam build their homes in four triangular parts, connected to form ... [ more ]


17. Letters to the Editor (CLI.1) (12 visits)

Letters to the Editor. To the Editors: I recently came across a book entitled A Grammar of Eastern Porno by Sally McLendon in the “linguistics” section of my local university library. Even though the book was written in 1975, and I don’t know what a “grammar” is, I was expecting some basic quality T&A. But it was just hundreds of pages of words, with no pictures! I went to the “linguistics” department and asked them if they had a “cunning linguist” who could help me, and they referred me to you. What do you have to say on the matter? Sigmoid G. Schlesserbessen — Dear Mr Schlesserbessen, It’s probably not Porno but Sorno, a language related (despite the protests ... [ more ]


18. Pseudo-Psiblings™—And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families—Trey Jones (11 visits)

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 ]


19. Bʀoᴋɛɴ Nɛws Nɛᴛwoʀᴋ (11 visits)

Bʀoᴋɛɴ Nɛws Nɛᴛwoʀᴋ. Doppler Adrenaline: Tone Acquisition Boot Camp Opens in Pitch Falls. Скооп С. Смашылев Junior Newsbreaker P ITCH FALLS, ML —An exciting new language-learning school opened earlier this year just north of Pitch Falls. Located in the hills surrounding the shores of Contour Sound, Doppler Adrenaline offers a unique experience for those who want to take on the often arduous task of learning a tonal language. We spoke to Ma Finisterre—owner and founder of Doppler Adrenaline—and Al “The Gonk” ... [ more ]


20. A Sample of Self-Definers—Historical Linguistics, Etymology, and Sound Changes: Part II—The SpecGram Book Elves™ (11 visits)

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 ]


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Last updated Oct. 14, 2026.