Out-of-this-World Fieldwork Puzzle #2

by Pecha Kucha

After several months of working among the Glectorsh and the Hinxdolr, you have earned their trust and admiration, and you’ve learned an awful lot about six or eight truly unusual languages. To celebrate your success, the Glectorsh and Hinxdolr leaders want to take you on a tour of their ten planned communities, where the Glectorsh and the Hinxdolr live together in total peace and complete harmony. From what you can gather, each town has developed its own unique Glectorsh-Hinxdolr creole, so you are very interested in gathering data that may have a bearing on your theories of Really Universal Grammar.

Unfortunately, the Glectorsh and Hinxdolr leaders are most proud of the system of roads that connect the planned communities, and insist that you see each and every one of the 15 roads. It takes 15 hours on the back of your Saber-Fanged Semi-Sentient Omnivore, Fluffy, to travel on each road. If you agree to visit every road, you can spend as long as you like in each community, doing fieldwork. You agree, and they give you a map of the communities and roads. You try to figure out a way to visit all the communities and travel along each road only once. You can’t turn off a road, only travel straight along it. (The ones that cross use an ingenious system of tunnels, overpasses, and loop-de-loops to avoid intersecting... all the more to see!)

What’s your best path in order to travel along each path just once?

Got Solutions?

If you think you’ve solved this fieldwork puzzle, send your solution to the editors of Speculative Grammarian by December 15th, 2010. You could win a SpecGram magnet. The correct solution and winners, if any, will be provided in the January 2011 issue.

	The First Report and Overview of the New Pan-global International Council for Marginalising Language (NPICML) on the execution and exclusion of all unnecessary vocabulary in the English Language—Sir CJ Cockspur
	SpecGram Vol CLX, No 2 Contents