New Series—The Works of Dr. Abstreuss
To Be Published 2021–2023

Psammeticus Press is proud to announce its new line of books for linguists-to-be. Written by Dr. Abstreuss, who must know what he’s talking about because he comes from one of those ____mouth Colleges, these books are sure to earn your children’s respect until they’re at least seven.

And to Think That I Heard It on Fourth Avenue—A sociolinguist asks various people what street he’s on.

Bartholomew and the Dooblets—Bartholomew must rescue his dialect from an invading swarm of Zwillinge étymologiques called Dooblets.

Fax in Sax—A playful vulpine protagonist produces tongue twisters by applying regular sound changes, not all of which are age-appropriate.

The Feet Book—Sam Iamb meets odd characters with unusual feet, including Tara Dactyl, Anna Pest, and a whole bunch of Paeons.

The 500 Hats of L. L. Zamenhof—Every time the doctor tries to write a háček, it magically gets turned upside down.

Green Ideas and Hamza—Noam-You’re-Not tries to get an unnamed character to use his glottis in a variety of structures, but he always responds, “Stop!”

How the Grinch Stole Structuralism—An antisocial hermit swoops in with a rag-tag band of misfits and steals all the trappings of Structuralism, leaving the bereft Linguistic Villagers to wonder whether there will ever be anything to celebrate again.

Hunches in Large Quantities, I Can Theorize with My Eyes Shut and Fingers in My Ears!, and Oh, the Thoughts I Done Thunk!—Multiple theorists learn the important lesson that they don’t have to write down everything that pops into their head. “We’re very productive”, they protest. “Like a cough”, retorts the narrator phlegmatically.

If I Ran the Linguistics Department—The narrator makes enemies by saying that many of the professors are old-fashioned and not quite good enough, but he ends up head of the department anyway by promising to buy a fancy new espresso machine.

The Larynx—The Larynx recounts the plight of the vocal tract and the Larynx—a windy, whingy phonetician-like organ—who speaks for the phones against the tweedy Pronunce-ler.

Mr. Jones Can Make a Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill! Can You?—The lead character makes animal sounds and creates IPA characters for them.

Norton Hears a Whom!—Norton discovers a tiny planet where English speakers use a particular object pronoun, but are they correct or hypercorrect?

Oh, the Places I’ve Been!—The narrator recounts horror tales from the field, complaining about subpar accommodations, unappetizing food, frizzy hair, and more.

On Beyond Zeta!—A young Greek boy gets only one-quarter of the way through the alphabet before his overactive imagination invents new letters.

One Fish Two Fish Zero-Morph Plural Form—From there to here, hence thither, two kids meet a variety of funny creatures with irregular plurals. It’s like Wales!

Scrambled Gegs Super—Theoretical linguists discover that ‘eggs’ is not the correct underlying form.

The Snowtches—Competing groups of Germanists on a beach tussle over which ablaut stem vowel alternation is the best.

The Rask in the Mask—A graduate student unmotivated to work on her thesis while stuck at home during COVID-19 is visited by a famous linguist.

The Rask in the Mask Comes Back—The Rask in the Mask returns, bringing along Small Clause A nested inside his utterance. Small Clause A reveals Small Clause B inside his utterance, and so on down to the microscopic and monomorphemic Small Clause Z. Together they try to get rid of a high tone that has spread from the NP to the VP to the PP.

There’s a Hockett in My Pocket!—A little boy talks about the strange phonemes that live in his mouth, such as the Mooth on his tooth, the Pflung on his tongue, the g͡baɭveeler q͡ʡidʝ on his alveolar ridge and the ǁʃeeluɱ on his velum.

The Tuff Coffs as He Plaos the Deaux—A collection of Dr. Abstreuss’s early writings and cartoons on spelling reform.

Tupi or Not Tupi?—In this award-winning sequel to the beloved children’s book Where’s Walde?, a bright-eyed phonetician embarks on a song-filled adventure to find the one Tupi speaker hidden in the giant multilingual city she lives in.

Dr. Abstreuss also wrote several books under the pen name Theo. ßuertsba (Abstreuss spelled backwards), including:

Please Try to Remember the First of Duodecember!—Imagine a day when all your wishes for etymological consistency come true in this classic Beginner Book! Duodecember the First is the day on which all your entirely reasonable etymological wishes come true.

Ten Examples Up On Top!—Three academics—a lyin’, a DAG, and a twanger—consistently pile out-of-context examples from languages they don’t know into their academic papers for fun.

Wackernagel Wednesday—The narrator has difficulty communicating when different elements of people’s sentences keep vying for second position.