Language Made Difficult, Vol. L — The SpecGram LingNerds are on their own this time. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss the dangers of mispronouncing the names of Canadian provinces, and then advise students as to what they should not do. They also fail to celebrate the 50th episode. Many outtakes are provided.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. L

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLIX — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by returning guest Tim Pulju. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss purported evidence against Chomsky, and then reveal the titles of their books, all beginning with Language:.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLIX

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.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVIII

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Kean Kaufmann. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds briefly discuss some innovative bits of English Grammar—no, totally!—and then try out some new parlor games featuring archaic English words.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVII

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.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLVI

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLV — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Pete Bleackley. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, the LingNerds discuss something that tries to look like iconicity, and then share their favorite linguistical jokes.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XLV

The History of the Indo-Europeans—An Agony in Six Fits; by Tim Pulju; From Volume CLXXIV, Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, December 2015 — Once upon a time, on a warm spring day about 5500 years ago, a young Indo-European named Bright-Fame drove an ox-cart into the family compound. “Greetings, father,” the young man said, using the vocative case. (Read by Zack Sjöberg, Claude Searsplainpockets, Declan Whitford Jones, Trey Jones, Joey Whitford, and Mairead Whitford Jones.)

The History of the Indo-Europeans—An Agony in Six Fits

Plagiarize This!; by An Unidentifiable Subset of the SpecGram Editorial Board; From Volume CLXXII, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian, March 2015 — It has come to our attention that entirely unfounded, spurious, and indefatigable accusations of heinous plagiarism have been made against the X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies. Specifically, these allegations involve recent articles in degenerative linguistics, which, we are told, included “large” blocks of “identical” text. (Read by Zack Sjöberg.)

Plagiarize This!

Plagiarism Uncovered in SpecGram Pages; by The Linguistic Inquirer; From Volume CLXXII, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian, March 2015 — Pursuant to the terms of the pre-litigious resolution of “Grammar Entelechy v. Speculative Grammarian” the editors of SpecGram have recently disclosed the truth about the academically distasteful practices by which the allegedly “esteemed” journal foists its linguistic and paralinguistic agenda on the profession. (Read by Butch McBastard, Jonathan van der Meer, Declan Whitford Jones, and Trey Jones.)

Plagiarism Uncovered in SpecGram Pages

Degenerative Grammar; by Desirée-Debauchée Cyntacks &amp; Dec A. D’Cadence; From Volume CLXXII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, February 2015 — Since the 1950’s, linguistics has been wild with excitement over Chomsky’s insights, collectively known as “generative grammar.” As all non-linguists know, however, grammar as speakers encounter it in daily life is actually degenerative. As one prominent analyst (Ellen DeGeneres) has put it, “Entropy rules.” (Read by Phineas Q. Phlogiston.)

Degenerative Grammar

Speculative Grammarian—the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics—is now available as an arbitrarily irregular audio podcast. Our podcast includes readings of articles from our journal, the occasional musical number or dramatical piece, and our talk show, Language Made Difficult. Language Made Difficult is hosted by the SpecGram LingNerds, and features our signature linguistics quiz—Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics—along with some discussion of recent-ish linguistic news and whatever else amuses us. Outtakes are provided.

I love this podcast. Equal parts hilarious and clever, every time I play it around people they “don’t get it.” Oh well. The small sound bites are perfect to add to my queue during my morning commute, or when I just want to be cheered up when I’m having a bad day.

Clever and funny

Ever found yourself slogging through yet another McCarthy &amp; Prince treatise with no end in sight? Or perhaps you&#39;ve stayed up into the wee hours of the morning digging through a grammar written in a no-longer-current framework by a long-dead missionary in search of a single piece of data you&#39;re not sure exists, but whose existence, you hope, will save the cagey thesis your advisor agreed to let you explore (you know, the one that bears little if any resemblance to your original thesis, the one you actually care about)? If this sounds like you, put down the reading material, and pick up your headphones: SpecGram has a podcast! Now you can spend time not being productive while still engaging with language in some way without having to resort to conlanging!

The Ling. Grad. Student's Cure for the Blues

Speculative Grammarian Podcast

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Gabe Olsen for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss chimpanzee gestures and the shutter-upper gun, and indulge in more Prescriptivist Confessions.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIII

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XII — The SpecGram LingNerds discuss goat and other mammalian accents, and liberal vs. conservative linguistics. They also investigate more Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics with repeat guest Sheri Wells-Jensen, and have another visit with Mr. Linguist.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XII

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVI — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Scott Yarborough for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss doing NLP “from scratch” and automated news story writing, as well as exploring a number of language-related conspiracy theories.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVI

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XV — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Scott Yarborough for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss bio- and linguistic diversity, the likability of simple names, and give high-quality sample answers to common linguistics comprehensive exam questions.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XV

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by guest Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics; and then he sticks around for the rest of the podcast. They also discuss aggressiveness in teenage girls caused by the character limitations of social media and the information density of various languages, as well as exploring a number of phonetical things you know that you may not know that you know.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVII

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIV — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Gabe Olsen for some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics. They also discuss how our brains make other people less boring, the likability of left-handed- vs right-handed-typed words, and a book about hyperpolyglots.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XIV

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVIII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined again by guest Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics; and then he sticks around for the rest of the podcast, again. They also discuss otovermology and whether Burushaski is Indo-European, and interview Tim about his early days with SpecGram.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XVIII

Book Review: Point’s A Grammar of the Lederhosen Tai; by Enrich Barbarosa del la Boca, Ph.D; From Volume CLII, Number 1 of Speculative Grammarian, January 2007. — After her landmark lexical study of the Frog-eating Aika in 1999, this year Point has given us another extensive monograph on the Migratory Tribes of Thailand. While other minorities in Thailand are torn between integrating into the larger society and maintaining their unique cultural identities, the so-called Migratory Tribes have completely isolated themselves from the mainstream. (Read by Keith Slater.)

Book Review: Point’s A Grammar of the Lederhosen Tai

Hazards of Fieldwork Among the Hiithrobnsn; by William Moore-Crusoe; From Volume CLXXIV, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, October 2015 — The Hiithrobnsn live in a remote, marshy and inhospitable region of Guyana. A traditional greeting amongst them is “Mind where you walk,” wise advice, as it is vitally important to make sure that you remain on what passes for dry land locally. Stray into the mire and you risk being bitten, stung, infected or electrocuted by the various unpleasant creatures that dwell therein. The Hiithrobnsn have 27 words for “swamp”, and all of them are pejorative. (Read by Pete Bleackley.)

Hazards of Fieldwork Among the Hiithrobnsn

Top Tips For Linguists—Part I; by The SpecGram Editorial Board; From Volume CLXXIV, Number 3, of Speculative Grammarian, November 2015 — Realizing that many linguists, young and old, find themselves unsure of how best to succeed (or have success thrust upon them), we of the Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board have assembled a collection of high-impact protips that will help any linguist achieve their full potential—and then some! (Read by The SpecGram Players.)

Top Tips For Linguists—Part I

Linguistic Contributions To The Formal Theory Of Big-Game Hunting; by R. Mathiesen; From Lingua Pranca, June, 1978 — The Mathematical Theory of Big-Game Hunting must surely be ranked among the major scientific achievements of the twentieth century. That this is so is largely the work of one man, H. Pétard, in whose fundamental paper (1938) certain recent advances in mathematics and physics were employed with great skill to create a theory of unmatched—not to say unmatchable!—power and elegance. One must not, of course, dismiss Pétard’s predecessors totally out of hand: the field had a long and distinguished history as a technology, was raised to the rank of a science by the Mysore and Nairobi schools during the nineteenth century, and finally achieved the exalted status of a professional discipline at the seminal First International Congress of Elephantology (held at London in 1910), where delegates from many nations discovered that they shared not only a common set of goals, aims, and targets, but also a common set of methods, theoretical predispositions and indispositions, and preferences in hard drink. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Pétard was the first to treat any aspect of the field with full mathematical rigor mortis. (Read by Les Strabismus.)

Linguistic Contributions To The Formal Theory Of Big-Game Hunting

Features of Tea: A Potted History; by Pete Bleackley; From Volume CLXXIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, June 2015 — According to legend, tea originated when an emperor of China was adding the feature [+boiled] to his drinking-water, having deduced the correlation with [−disease]. A chance gust of wind led to the water becoming [+leaves], and the Emperor noticed it had become [+flavour]. (Read by Pete Bleackley.)

Features of Tea: A Potted History

The Compleat Linguist; by John-Boy Walton; From Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca, October, 2009 — Man’s sentence’s in vain, for it’s subject is pain... (Read by Brock Schardin.)

The Compleat Linguist

Saving Endangered Languages with Prescriptivism; by Neil de Veratte; From Volume CLXXII, Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, April 2015 — All over the world, languages are being lost at an alarming rate. Field linguists do their best to preserve these languages, but find their speaker communities apathetic. “Why should I learn Wotʃa-Korlitt?” they ask, “It’s Spanish I need to get a job.” We need to look at successful languages, whose speakers are engaged with their language, to see what endangered languages can learn from them. When we do, we inevitably find that the most successful languages are those which possess a tradition of prescriptivist grammar. (Read by Brock Schardin.)

Saving Endangered Languages with Prescriptivism

On the Mytholinguistic Significance of Butterflies; by Mary Hadlitt-Lamb; From Volume CLXXI, Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, December 2014 — A remarkable cross-linguistic pattern can be observed in the words for “butterfly”. While these words seldom appear to be cognate even in closely related languages, they are surprisingly similar between apparently unrelated languages. (Read by Trey Jones.)

On the Mytholinguistic Significance of Butterflies

The Laziest Language on Earth; by Claude Searsplainpockets; From Volume CLIII, Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, November 2007 — Back in 1922, my Historical Linguistics professor, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, noted that ease of articulation is a driving force in language change—hence the regular occurrence of lenition rules—but the opposing need to maintain a clear communication channel prevents everything from degenerating to a long low mid vowel. Turns out he was wrong. (Read by Claude Searsplainpockets and Trey Jones.)

The Laziest Language on Earth

The best podcast episodes of the most interesting stories and things. From skyping someone while they're in space, to tracking down and meeting a telephone scammer in person, to the story of a Galapagos. These episodes will keep you and all your friends entertained and captivated for hours. Learn something new in every episode! Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!

Best Episodes: Interesting Stories & Things

The best podcasts about ourselves as well as the world through the lense of Science. Specific topics include things about our brain, emotions to biology, physics and more!