SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

Inter-Lingual Personal Script. Daniel Swanson. Do you ever get annoyed that the IPA has holes in it? Do you ever wish it was a bit more featural? Do you ever get lonely while writing phonetic transcriptions? So did I, and that’s why I’ve created The Inter-Lingual Personal Script (ILPS). ILPS is Featural Extensible Intuitive¹ Composed almost entirely of stick figures Consonants. Stick figures facing left indicate voiceless consonants, while those facing right indicate voiced consonants. Direction of facing is either the side on which they hold their tool or the side toward which they are pointing both arms. Plosives wear top hats, trills wear halos, taps wear crowns, fricatives keep ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian and SpecGram.com. Our Story. The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields. SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while ... [ more ]

Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCIV, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Vincent Fish; Associate Editors: Luca Dinu, Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Emily Davis, Andrew Lamont, Gabriel Lanyi; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; The Syntactic Structures of Linguistics; February 2025, ... [ more ]

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVIII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by returning guest Kean Kaufmann. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss a one hundred word language, and then move on to the royal and other orders for adjectives. ... [ listen ]

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XXVIII — The SpecGram LingNerds go it alone once again. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss some problems with (the) French, and reveal their least favorite subdisciplines of linguistics. ... [ listen ]

Subliminal Linguistics; By Trey Jones, at Rice University; From Volume CXLVII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, February 1993. — The new field of subliminal linguistics questions whether or not it is possible that there are clues available to children for language acquisition which are not obvious to those who study the process, and which may occur below the level of conscious recognition, but nonetheless aid language acquisition. (Read by Trey Jones.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

The Phonetician’s Love Poem; by Epiphanios o Phantasiopliktos; From Volume CLXI, Number 1 of Speculative Grammarian,; February 2011. — Sweet modulations of fundamental frequency / Air particles dancing to and fro (Read by Jonathan van der Meer.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

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 ]

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIX — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Madalena Cruz-Ferreira for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss the fact that German speakers can’t say “squirrel” and whether “modulo” is the nerdiest preposition. Finally, they give more Prescriptivist Confessions. ... [ listen ]

Ye Olde Punnery—The Jigglepike Fragment; by SpecGram Wire Services; From Volume CLXX, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian,; May 2014 — A small fragment of a manuscript believed to be part of the lost play “Ye Olde Punnery” by Willhebe Jigglepike has been unearthed at the bottom of a centuries-old Oxyrhynchus® Brand Garbage Dump outside the sleepy burg of Stratford-upon-Revlon. (Read by The SpecGram Players.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVI — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by returning guest Pete Bleackley. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss something *else* that tries to look like iconicity, and then look at some innovative and/or abominable on-going changes in English. ... [ listen ]

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. If you have ideas for other messages that need ... [ more ]

Guidelines for the Behavior of Graduate Students of Phonetics; by Felicity ConditionsFrom Volume CLVI, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; April 2009 — 1. The IPA symbol for a bilabial click is not called “the cervix,” even if it really looks like one. (Read by Veronika Reeve.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

Hymns for the Reverent Linguist; from The Linguistick Hymnary (1845); From Volume CLXVI, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian,; November 2012. — Great is Thy Faithfulness; Typology, Typology; The Linguist’s One Foundation; Joy to the Word. (Performed by Jay and the Fictones.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

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 ]

Phonological Ergativity, The greatest linguistic discovery of the century¹. Keith Slater, UC Santa Barbara. The history of linguistics reveals a consistent tendency to overlook the unfamiliar in favor of that which closely approximates structures readily apparent in the analyst's own dialect. Just as Western philologists failed for decades to grasp the simple truth that not all languages need Latin verbal inflection systems, so were modern linguists lamentably slow to divine the nature of entirely non-European case systems such as the widespread ergative-absolutive type. Commendable though our recent progress in this arena has been, there remains much work to be done. In this paper, it will be shown that ergativity ... [ 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 ]

Оrthоgraрhіc Perрlехer. Welcome to the Speculative Grammarian Оrthοɡrаphіс Ρerplехеr! This not-quite-pointless little tool will munge your text, randomly replacing some characters with homoglyphs that are nearly identical¹—or at least quite reasonably similar to the untrained eye. Why? To make text both very hard and very easy to find via normal search (try to find “οrthoɡrарhіс реrрleхer” on this page, for example); to confuse and amaze your friends and enemies alike;⁶ to pass the time in a ... [ more ]

Review of Van Der Fort’s Guide to Field Linguistics; by Webley Louis Severson III; From Volume CLXI, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian,; April 2011 — Van Der Fort’s Guide to Field Linguistics by J. S. S. van der Fort / Rating: ƛƛƛƛ / ƛƛƛƛ (Underlyingly Good) (Read by Joey Whitford.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

Whettam’s “Linguistics: an extraordinarily short introduction”; by Reviewed by A. Crostic; From Volume CLI, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian,; April 2006 — “Linguistics: an extraordinarily short introduction”. / H.P. Whettam. Droxfo University Press, 2006. 1p. $137.00 (Read by Keith Slater.) ... [ listen ] ... [ read the article ]

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