Speculative Grammarian Podcast

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.

Linguistics and Television; by C Robson; From Volume CLXVI, Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, March 2013 — It occurred to me the other day that despite a great range of educational channels available to the modern television viewer, it appears that linguistics has been somewhat ignored. Try as you might, but your cable or satellite provider will sadly not feature “Channel Schwa”, for it does not exist. (Read by Veronika Reeve.)

Obituary for Simon M. Tating; From Volume CLXVI, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, November 2012 — Prof. Simon M. Tating, 63, of Farborough, passed away 19th November 2012 attempting to learn the pronunciation of certain Bantu words involving various voiceless implosive phonemes. (Read by Trey Jones.)

On the Quantum Nature of Linguistic Fame—A Reply to Slater; by Cadwallader Colden; From Volume CLXVII, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian, June 2013 — Dear Sirs: / Your a̶u̶g̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶e̶r̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶n̶o̶u̶r̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶e̶s̶t̶i̶m̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶d̶i̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶u̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶c̶c̶a̶s̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶i̶n̶o̶f̶f̶e̶n̶s̶i̶v̶e̶ journal recently published a sketch of a mathematical model for the fame of a linguistic theory. While it deserves some small credit for broaching the topic, perhaps brief mention in a footnote forty years down the line in a little-read and oft-forgotten book of quaint and curious lore for the entertainment of amateurs, fanboys, and other innumerate juvenile delinquents, it is itself muddled and befuddled and would only serve to muddle the issue and befuddle others were it published where genuine scholars might actually read it. (Read by Cathal Peelo.)

Fifty Grades of A; by i ɛl dʒemz; From Volume CLXV, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, July 2012 — Get the book that everyone’s talking about... (Read by Trey Jones, Cathal Peelo, Claude Searsplainpockets, Veronika Reeve, and Brianne Hughes.)

Optimality Theory Was a Hoax—Prince and Smolensky finally come clean; by SpecGram Wire Services; From Volume CLXVI Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, March 2013 — At a tearful news conference during the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Allen Prince confessed that Optimality Theory was a hoax. “I just can’t live with the lies any longer,” he said. (Read by Brianne Hughes.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XXVII — The SpecGram LingNerds go it alone this time. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss the grammaticalization of "slash" and review some Comprehensive Exam questions and answers.

A Student’s Guide to the History of Linguistics Based on Example Sentences; by Franz Neumayer; From Volume CLXII, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian, August 2011 — The following sentences exemplify important concepts in linguistics, and relate them to the linguists whose names are most associated with their development. They are provided as a service to MA students reviewing for comprehensive exams. (Read by Trey Jones.)

Linguist Sues Language Community; by SpecGram Wire Services; From Volume CLXVI, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, January 2013 — Graduate student Simon Ticks, of University of Minnesota Department of Linguistics, is suing a White Hmong village in Northern Thailand for failing to provide the evidence needed for his dissertation project. (Read by Veronika Reeve.)

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Computational Linguist, Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill, Chomsky—A New Game for Every Linguist; by Phlange Kadigan; From Volume CLVII, Number 3, Speculative Grammarian, November 2009 — We are almost all quite familiar with the game commonly known as Rock-Paper-Scissors (also known in some circles as Rochambeau), in which two opponents face off, simultaneously choosing a hand shape to represent one of the three eponymous “weapons”. The interest in the game stems from the non-transitivity of the superiority of the weapons. (Read by Trey Jones.)

Strings and Things: A Unificational Meta-Theory for All Linguistics; by Trent Slater; From Volume CLXVII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, May 2013 — Despite the best efforts in those sciences that ignore the importance of morphological historiography, it has so far proved impossible to provide one theory to rule them all. Thus, as head of the largest group of linguistic meta-theoreticians in the Whole World, I feel that it falls to me to propose and prove a Grand Theory of Everything Linguistic. (Read by Cathal Peelo.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XXVI — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Aya Katz. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss whether English has a perfectly phonetic orthography, and some of the interesting languagey things that linguists notice out in the world. (And in the outtakes Trey insults various programming languages left and right, potentially sparking a future holy war.)

Everything Linguists Ever Wanted To Know About Prime Numbers; by A. Nonymous; From Volume CLXII, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, June 2011 — How do various types of linguists go about analyzing, for themselves and their conspecifics, the primality of odd numbers greater than one? The methods vary by discipline, but the results are all equally valid. (Read by Trey Jones.)

Guidelines for the Behavior of Graduate Students of Phonetics; by Felicity Conditions; From 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.)

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.)

Handbook for Linguistic Elicitation, Volume 28: Laziness and Inactivity; by Editors of Psammeticus Press; From Volume CLXVII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, May 2013 — Handbook for Linguistic Elicitation, Volume 28: Laziness and Inactivity / From the Editors of Psammeticus Press / Published 2013. (Read by Cathal Peelo.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XXV — The SpecGram LingNerds (including new LingNerd Sheri Wells-Jensen) are joined by guest Aya Katz. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss the applications of involuntary gripping in response to hand-related verbs, and review a surprisingly large number of language-related books.

Help with the SpecGram Podcast; by Trey Jones

The Γραμματο-Χαοτικον Manifesto; by The Γραμματο-Χαοτικον; From Volume CL, Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, October 2005 — We are the Γραμματο-Χαοτικον, an underground alliance of linguists, philologists, and polyglots. Our self-appointed role is to encourage arbitrary and capricious change both in Language and among languages, world-wide. (Read by Trey Jones.)

On the Taxonomic Classification of minimalistici; by Athanasious Schadenpoodle; From Volume CLXIII, Number 1, of Speculative Grammarian, October 2011 — To the toiler in the full-furrowed fields of taxonomy, there can be no surprise attendant upon the discovery that a previously well-established classification has been called into question by closer scrutiny of the species involved, or by advances in the analytic mechanisms underlying the distinctions informing the taxonomy itself. The very act of assigning a token to a type bears the potential of alternate assignment, and each move toward greater abstraction does naught but amplify the range of possibilities. When the specific field one is attempting to segment is that of the family Linguisticus, even less surprise is possible, both because of the prevailing lack of agreement among zoölogists about the criteria to use, and because of the general sense of enervation any analysis of Linguisticus evokes (the latter being, perhaps, one of their defense mechanisms