Anglomorphic Cuneiform and Puzzle Solution

Trey Jones
l’École de SpecGram, Washington D.C.

In the last issue, we offered a mildly amusing puzzle; the task given was to decipher the apparently “anglomorphic” Kenduzandi cuneiform found in the image—provided by the Weyland Tiberius Flanderklieg Archives—of the stone tablet accompanying the mytholingual tale “Why Princes are not Scribes, and the Rat Eats Grain”.

Of course the correlation between the Kenduzandi cuneiform and alphabetic letter forms is amusing, but ultimately ridiculous. To give it the respect it deserves, we got a fourth grader to outline the letters in marker. (To really give it the respect it deserves, we should have gotten a second grader to do it, but we couldn’t find a second grader with enough Greek on such short notice.) Thanks to Kevin Bickelson for helping us out! Kevin’s original is hanging on the fridge in the editor’s lounge at the SpecGram main offices. A reproduction is provided below.

For those with limited alphabetic imagination, here are the “words” “found” “hidden” in the Kenduzandi cuneiform:

Of the thousands of submissions we received, the following linguarcheological masterminds stood out, with bigram recall and precision scores ranging from 70% to 98%, and F-Measure scores from 70% to 90%. In order from highest to somewhat less high score:

• Joey Whitford
• Tanjam Jacobson
• Mairead Whitford Jones
• Bernd Möbius

Despite circumstantial evidence of Whitford-related collusion and possible improper information sharing, each winner will receive a SpecGram magnet of their choice.

Our lawyers made us include this next bit: This work is licensed by Speculative Grammarian under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License (CC BY-NC 3.0).

It has also been suggested that some might enjoy expanding on this anglomorphic cuneiform theme, and producing their own stone tablets, t-shirts, or other amusing but ultimately ridiculous scribblings. To that end, we are hereby providing a set of ready-to-use anglomorphic cuneiform characters—Latin and Greek, uppercase and lowercase. Every letter of both alphabets is available, though not necessarily in both upper- and lowercase forms.

And, just in case the SpecGram Art Department has been sleeping on the job again, and the intended letters aren’t abundantly clear, here is a handy row-by-row key to the characters provided. Some characters, like “C”, could be used as lowercase or uppercase, with just a little resizing. These are indicated as “Cc” and the like.

A B Cc D E F G g

h h i J Kk L l Mm

n Oo Pp Q q R Ss

Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

Α Β Γ δ Ε ε Ζ η

Θ θ Ι Κκ Λ λ Μ μ

ν Ξ Οο Ππ Ρ ρ Σ σ ς

Ττ Υ υ Φφ Χχ Ψ ω

acute, grave, quote/comma, macron; circumflex, haček; brackets; misc decorations

Please drop us a line if you use these lovely anglomorphic cuneiform in your own projects. Enjoy!

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