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The Real Etymology of Timothy. Eura U. Pertú Peninsular Institute of Etymology. [Note: More than twenty years ago (SpecGram CXLVII.3, to be exact) we published what now appears to have been a spurious etymology of Timothy, seemingly forced upon us by shadowy forces and/or powerful lobbies. We can’t for the life of us imagine who would do such a thing. Fortunately, this original, unbowdlerized version—presented here without fear of lost fingers—quite surprisingly turned up among our executive editors’ stockpile of Hanebisho toilet paper. The truth wants to be told —Eds.] It has long been observed that Timothy is a name of obscure ... [ more ]
The Native American Origins of Jack and Jill. Mary Hadlitt-Lamb, Grimm Institute of Folkloristics. “Jack and Jill” is usually described as a traditional English nursery rhyme. Few scholars have considered the possibility that its origins may lie further afield. However, compare the first verse Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after. with the following Mohawk word tahotenonhwarori’taksen’skwe’tsherakahrhatenia’tonháîtie “That fool came tumbling down the hill.” A casual analysis would attribute this to coincidence. After all, the English rhyme ... [ more ]
Modern and Historical Graphical Representations of Structural Relationships in Spoken and Written English Sentential Utterances. selected and presented, with commentary, by, Nattapoŋ Yunloŋ Seuŋyoŋ BFE University, Waikikamukau, New Zealand With the mild splash created last year by Florey’s small but sincere homage, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, sentence diagramming (Figure 1) was momentarily en vogue. Of course, it didn’t last long, as any student of the field could have predicted, because diagramming sentences is generally quite a boring task. The general population will look cursorily at a cleverly diagrammed sentence, in much the way they look at car wrecks on the ... [ more ] 
What is a Morphome?. By David J. Peterson, Consulting Editor of Speculative Grammarian. Hi! This is Consulting Editor David J. Peterson. You know, we have a lot of fun here at Speculative Grammarian, but in devoting an entire issue to the controversial yet provocative term “morphome” we felt it was important to include a straightforward, down-to-Earth explanation of exactly what a “morphome” is. We knew there was bound to be confusion, so we felt it would be a good idea to just head all of it off at the pass, and include this piece right at the beginning of the issue. So! If you don’t know what a morphome is, or if you feel you do but still have questions, read the article ... [ more ]
Review Article. Lamb, Sydney. 1977. Mathematical Games, Puzzles, and Fallacies. New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc. 71 pp. Linguistic historiography over the past few years has awakened to the importance of numerology in the development of linguistics this century, particularly in the generative school (see, for example, G.D. Duvkal’s “Science or Mysticism? The Importance of Numeral Notation in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures”). The little-known volume which is the subject of this review demonstrates the even greater significance of numerology as the foundation of Sydney Lamb’s stratificational grammar. The book first appeared in 1965, under the title The Magic of Numbers. ... [ more ] 
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 ]
Speculative Grammarian, in association with the X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies, is proud to present yet another irregular installment in the Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series. One Hundred Words for Snowclone. An Anthropological Linguistic Study of Igloovian0. Bizarre Grammars of the World, Vol. 70 Prologue. Any linguist worthy of attending SALT knows of the linguistic myth that eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. There was even some sort of vocabulary-related hoax or other about it back in the day. This idea has become so ingrained in our culture, so cliché that there is even a ... [ more ]
Towards a Detailed Biochemistry of Innate Mental Structures: Consequences of an OT Approach to the Contemporary Novel. by, Mongo Yalbag, Independent Scholar1. One of the many innumerable benefits of the Chomskyan revolution is that we can see clearly that everything in the human mind is synthetic a priori, except for the parts that are analytic a priori. As the great man (pax eocum) himself has stated, even the concept of “carburetor” is innate. Besides the fascinating fact that both UG and the concept “UG” are therefore innate,2 this has deafening repercussions for the less well-endowed humanities. In particular, it has been stated that there are only seven ... [ more ]
Linguistic Poems for Valentine’s Day. From the SpecGram Podcast. ... For your amusement as Valentine’s Day approaches, we present a collection of recordings of various poems that have appeared in SpecGram and our sister publications over the years, all read by Editor-in-Love Jonathan van der Meer. These vignettes of love, lust, longing, loss, and linguistics are sure to stir your heart. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram by Alex Savoy; From Volume CLXI, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; March 2011. My Love is Like a Colorless Green Simile by Rasmus Burns; From Volume CLXIV, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; March 2012. Love Queries of a Linguist by John Miaou; From ... [ more ]
Linguistics Nerd Camp. Bethany Carlson. Marty finds incontrovertible evidence that English inflectional noun morphology is an open class. ... [ more ]
A More Interesting Observation Than You a Response. Aloysius Vinicius Perle, Assistant Professor of Theoretical Pragmatics, Western Nebraska Community College, Scottsbluff NE. Recently, in the process of perusing a particularly brutal piece of syntactic analysis, we were reliably informed in a footnote that “Pico wrote a more interesting novel than Brio wrote a play” is an eminently asteriskable production—or, rather, non-production, as it supposedly would not be spontaneously produced outside the confines of syntacticians’ offices and insane asylums. Curious that, for not 24 hours earlier we encountered a statement on Facebook, “Everything’s bigger in Texas! Our state has ... [ more ]
Moundsbar Connections. On the isle of Dolop, off the coast of Gwap, lies the tiny community of Pif. However, we know nothing about it. Turning to Moundsbar, there are at least three languages related to it, Aro, Sorno and Koro. Aro is spoken by a few hundred souls in an enclave in the “Fan” district of Richmond, Virginia; Sorno has been extinct since the third century but was spoken on Guam and Saipan in the last years of the Roman Empire, though you would never know it from Roman history; no speakers of Koro have been located but a Koro language must be hypothesized to account for certain telegrams received through the years by the Moundsbarians which they were unable to read. Moundsbar /kp/ corresponds to /p/ in Aro, ... [ more ]
The Quotta and the Quottiod. Punctuation Designed for Linguists, by Linguists. Vére Çélen, l’École de SpecGram, Cheboksary, Chuvashia. It is not news to linguists that particular forms of punctuation can be problematic. One frequent source of considerable friction in certain circles is the unending debate over whether and when (and, increasingly, why) commas and periods go inside or outside quotation marks—especially when they are not actually part of the material to be quoted. Typically careful linguists usually prefer not to include punctuation in a quoted citation form or gloss, while many punctilious punctuationally prescriptivist publishers demand they be ... [ 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 ]
Summum Ius, Summa Iniuria. A Message from the SpecGram Editorial Board. The editors of SpecGram regret to inform our loyal readership of an adverse development in the UK arm of the SpecGram organisation. We have recently been informed that The UK Government’s R/Loyal Inspectorate of Linguistic Journals is considered levying additional import charges on linguistics journals that trade within any of the constituent countries of the UK. A recent revamp of the UK Government’s Linguistics Journal Informativity Index, the metric by which it measures the cultural and educational capital injected into the country by linguistic journals and journal-related products, means that all linguistics ... [ more ]
It Was a Dark and Stormy Noun... 1986 Edition. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. Some of our more, ahem, mature readers may remember that back in the mid-80’s Speculative Grammarian ran an annual Bulwer-Lytton-style contest, asking readers to submit the worst possible opening sentence for a linguistically-themed book. In fact, some of those same readers may have submitted entries, and may still be wondering whether or not they won. Sorry about that. The contest entries were in fact judged by the editorial board, but a dispute between Pulju (a Givónian functionalist) and Slater (a Lasnikian generativist) turned uncivil and the winners were never announced. In the meantime, ... [ more ]
Further Pre-Nara Japanese Poem Discoveries. SpecGram Wire Services, Tom Stinnett reporting. Archaeologists from the Basil Randolph Anderson Center for Lexico-Archeological Sartorial Poetry Studies (BRA-CLASPS), at the site of the pre-Nara dig in Japan have made further announcements. First, Translator Karōshi Sararīman at BRA-CLASPS has provided a likely title and possible translation of the first fragment, reported on earlier. Margo Edi and her fellow researchers have also provided another fragments of the exquisite poem about the woman wearing yellow garments. It is now clear that her name was Si (pronounced “Shee” in modern Japanese) and that the poem describes a ... [ more ]
Ask Grammaticality Brown. Since my last column, I’ve had loads of questions. I thought I’d deal with a couple so you can see what my gardening looks like on a daily basis. Q: You’ve got famous trees and shrubs but you don’t grow a PIE tree, why is that? A: I’m a bit crusty in my views. For me, a reconstructed language is like reconstituted meat: it’s technically still the same as it was before but all the good bits are gone. Some tell me that I can grow thousands of languages from PIE roots but I’ve been planting them in the ground and all I got was a bunch of crows gathering to eat up the spilt steak & kidney. Don’t get me started on the gravy! I might copy the great ... [ more ]
Encrypted Missives from the Cosmos. A Letter from Associate Editor Jonathan Downie. We at SpecGram pride ourselves on providing the most up-to-date and stimulating research available anywhere in the world.1 However, in this issue, due to budget cuts, staff holidays and an unfortunate incident with a hairdryer and a mongoose, we have had to content ourselves with the best research available from people who have the time to submit to journals that don’t have an impact factor. We therefore apologise in advance for anyone who seriously thought they would read material that is more useful than the contents of a postmodernist’s refrigerator.2 ... [ more ]
An Auxiliary Collection of 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 11th 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. Test question. Explain why the following sentence is an example of structural ambiguity: Ali saw the man who ate the durian in the canteen. Answers. ‘ate the durian in the canteen’ ... [ more ]
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Last updated Jul. 18, 2026.