SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCV, Number 1 Antepenultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham, Vincent Fish; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Luca Dinu; Associate Editors: Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Emily Davis, Andrew Lamont, Gabriel Lanyi, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; Declarative in the Streets, Hortative in the Sheets; September 2025, ... [ more ]

Improving L2 Performance with Pirahã Shigudo_, and Simple English. The effects of syntactic and semantic priming on successful L2 communication. Jeannot Van Tricasse, Jules Verne University, Paris, France. As is well known, students of foreign languages are often frustrated by their lack of ability to express thoughts of normal complexity in the language they are studying.^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10} This frustration can easily turn into a bitterness that leaves the student unable or unwilling to continue their language studies, even after a year or more of study.^{11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20} This is an unfortunate state of affairs for many reasons. Bilingualism has been implicated in ... [ more ]

How Many is Umpteen?. A Linguistic and Mathematical Exploration and Explanation. brought to you by Ura Hogg, of Skaroo University¹, and the Letter U. We have all heard various people use the quasi-numerical expression umpteen to refer to a largish number of items, as in (1) below: (1) I have umpteen things to do before I can leave.² What I plan to do in this brief paper is to determine how many umpteen is. First I feel I must in part justify the claim that umpteen can in fact refer to an exact numerical quantity despite its varying use.³ Though we often use vague number expressions such as in (2) and (3) below, we nearly as often use exact, though large, ... [ more ]

Calquing Greatness, How Other Fields Find Success Borrowing From Linguistics. P. Ạȧṛȯṇī Mhɯ̈sz & Nıöll ʘ’Dȷ̊ı̥e, Interdimensional Panlinguistic Alliance (IPA), Earth-8311. In a world where Linguistics is regarded as the Cæsarissa of the Social Sciences, it is only natural that the Lesser Disciplines seek to emulate the matter and form of her successes. After much discussion, debate, and dialogue—including careful consideration of the ability of non-linguists to emulate (or merely ape?) the ideas & ideals, processes & procedures, and techniques & technology of Linguistics—the Father ... [ more ]

Submit!. A Letter from Senior Editor Jonathan Downie. Most expensive readers, Given our commitment to be committed to causes that seem prima facie respectable, it has come to our notice that some clarifications are in order. Apparently, our work has led to some unfortunate confusion—confusion that we would like to separate from the fortunate confusion that drives merchandise sales. For a start, while Speculative Grammarian is and always has been a bastion of open access, we use neither the Green Open Access model nor the Gold Open Access model. Instead, we use the Fuchsia Open Access Model. We don’t actually know what that means but it’s better than the brown model of some other journals. It ... [ more ]

A Letter from Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju. In an era of tweets and AI summaries, the news that Speculative Grammarian will be ceasing publication by the end of 2025 should, perhaps, come as no surprise.¹ Readers accustomed to postings of no more than 280 characters, or to AI that boils everything down to a few sentences, can have little interest in reading articles that include, in some cases, hundreds of words arranged in several paragraphs.² Perhaps, too, the editorial board was influenced by an article published some twenty years ago in this very journal, which argued that as papers go, the shorter, the better. Taking this argument to its logical (though not necessarily unimpeachable) conclusion, the ... [ more ]

Previous Puzzle Solutions. The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™. The solution to last issue’s Word Ladder 三 puzzle has been provided here. A whole heaping bunch of puzzlemeisters figured this one out. Of the countless billions of correct answers, the following were selected for recognition. Each will receive a SpecGram prize of their choosing, while supplies last. Benjamin Yang • Mikael Thompson • Ondřej Svoboda • Lachlan Turner In addition, the following puzzlers have achieved the everlasting glory that comes with an honorable mention: Πάνος Ιωαννίδης • Mirtel Koppel • Vincent Fish ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

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