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| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||||||||
| 32 | 33 | 34 | ||||||||||||||
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| 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | ||||||||||||
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| 57 | 58 |
1. They study speech sounds in faux net(-ish) inns
9. Those French will be back in a quick second
11. Semiotician Umberto came back as Welsh, okay?
12. Who is not allowed in the loo, in France? It’s you!
13. Watkins (to his friends) or D.C. nonprofit organization (to theirs)
14. Most modern syntacticians no longer require hiring crabby Ann, all messed up
17. I dropped out of Italic (twice!), took a powder
18. Her object precedes independent clause, like Beowulf
20. Using a single word to express a complete idea? Don’t say “hollow phrases”!
22. Destroying 9 down, I wave in Portuguese.
23. Correspond with math (around 100).
26. Democrat from Alabama follows usual way of doing things
29. Exclamation of surprise follows mantra for Midwestern tribe with Siouan language
32. Sprachbund, e.g., in a real place
33. Phonologist Whalen and his dialect both full of beer
34. Freire, to go no longer in Portuguese, now unbound
35. Temporary shelter starting with tense but ending with aspect
36. Makes everything quiet and calm until surrounded by two sentences
38. California valley (& winery) surrounded by assimilation
39. Cutting the edges off Hindi text, verse, they list things alphabetically.
40. Leave me trade a five for ten in linguistic unit
42. Desired outcome is my Esperanto coming back
43. Transport vehicle preposed in Dutch surnames
44. Right woman loses head in common alphabet
47. Cell spasms of interest to 1-Across
49. Ancient Roman goes toward death notice, briefly
50. Freire a little bit Latin?
52. La donna è mobile, e.g., in Hungarian, or even Tocharian!
53. Can I locate/
55. Less common language type briefly takes text ‘you’ out of French ‘you’
56. Emergent grammar starts with linguistic unit? Suffix?
57. Reset, sew loony Berkeley author of From Etymology to Pragmatics
58. Pacific Northwestern language family has nails twisted
2. No North Carolina native surrounded non-
3. Hockett or Chomsky contains illumination
4. LSA policy hostile and frosty, in the end
5. Philippine language, once tabu, upset and out of time
6. Italian woman furious about game company
7. Nary a noun is negative in French
8. Brugmann and Osthoff referred to themselves as not sick in the end, but high
9. Can Old English paddle?
10. The Spanish drink for Gentle Art of Verbal Self-
13. Obsessive interests follow endless circus, one thousand examples going around root or stem
14. Beijing steamed bun found in Bilbao, one pound less
15. Meillet, at heart, unwell
16. Head-
17. Choir time least chaotic for representing syntactic argument structure
19. Cocks see hip bones, or so they say
21. Only fish with bottoms of feet and shoes
24. A real English noun, originally, now Dutch ears (of corn, e.g.)
25. To be likely to see the end without him
26. Like stressful phonology, strange to see it calmer?
27. Indian legumes lead Missouri out of 26-Across
28. Hell, no soap? Infuriating, but often predictable or even unnoticed
30. A manner I find disorderly in branch of Indo-
31. Semanticist Irene overwhelmed by the implicature
36. Reflexive in Romance, a place to bathe?
37. I’m all about a sentence in belief system
38. They are strict, if obscured in (as ever) Italian
41. Fifth in Greek returns with no lisp after English
45. Obsess without sibilance over British honor, briefly
46. Half of Mexican Otomanguean language equals 1009?
47. More than one quick verbal pause for Clue Professor
48. Latin makes a comeback without me, but with a meaning related to birth
50. What students want, in short: preposition, adjective, two sentences
51. After university, football judge quickly goes back to German shore
54. Myers-
Like other cryptic crosswords, the clues in this puzzle are not straightforward. Unlike most, however, this one focuses mainly on languages and linguistics. For instance, the clue for Zapotec might be “Oto-niCE TOP, A Zany), or many other combinations of puns, anagrams, or typographic quirks. Punctuation in clues is often misleading. Each clue contains both a definition (of sorts) and a more cryptic part, but these may come in any order.
If you can complete the crossword and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by October 15th, 2020, you could win some SpecGram merch. The correct solution and winners will be announced in the next issue of Speculative Grammarian.
| P | U | N | S | T | R | E | S | S |
| O | R | E | O | I | O | N | I | C |
| A | I | R | S | C | H | E | M | E |
| W | U | G | A | R | A | W | A | N |
| A | E | S | C | H | W | A | E | T |
| Y | E | A | C | O | W | N | E | R |
| M | A | X | E | H | A | S | T | A |
| A | R | I | S | E | R | I | A | L |
| L | O | S | S | Y | M | B | O | L |
Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch:
Carl Joshua Quines • Aoife Ó Briain • Vincent Fish