This is the thirteenth Rasmus Rask puzzle, devoted to the original Mr. Charming Scandinavian Linguist. The puzzle is similar to a crossword puzzle, in that there is a grid for filling in words and phrases, and clues for the ACROSS and DOWN directions. However, all the squares in a Rasmus Rask puzzle are filled with letters, and the answers to the clues may (but are not required to) overlap. Clues for a particular row or column are given together, in the order they appear in the grid. No indication of the amount of overlap between clues is given. Letters spelling out RASMUS RASK along the diagonal are given to provide a framework for filling in the answers.
Complete the puzzle and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by April 1st, 2023, and you could win a prize. The correct solution and winners, if any, will be announced in the upcoming June issue.
| 0 R | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 1 | A | ||||||||
| 2 | S | ||||||||
| 3 | M | ||||||||
| 4 | U | ||||||||
| 5 | S | ||||||||
| 6 | R | ||||||||
| 7 | A | ||||||||
| 8 | S | ||||||||
| 9 | K |
• Chomsky doesn’t care how well you do this with your language.
• This clue needs to be edited.
• Contrary to Yoda, whether you do or do not figure it out, there is this
• A source of whiskey or bread.
• Speaking of things that are virtually unknown, this term for an atomic unit of meaning is fairly uncommon, even among linguists.
• ???
┬──
├ Finnic
├ Hungarian
├ Khanty
├ Mansi
├ Mari
├ Mordvinic
├ Permic
├ Sami
└ Samoyedic
• A kind of scan used to study aphasia.
• One of the several homophones pronounced /su/ (in General American).
• The common initial substring of two etymologically unrelated forms of textual but non-
• One of the several homophones pronounced /hɔɹ/ (in General American).
• A retired military animal doctor. (abbrev.)
• The Ʌndərwʊd Portable has these for ƕ, ƻ, ǀ, ǁ, ǂ, and ʘ
• Computational linguists often need to disambiguate this for a given word.
• Fallback overseas career for American linguistics degree holders who don’t make it into academia.
• This can come in several flavors, including, K, Wal and Kwik-E.
• The part of this now inaccurately named creole’s appellation that comes from the English word talk, though it can also mean “language”.
• An impersonal/
• One of English’s first person pronouns.
• Homophone of one of the answers in 7 Down.
• Based on cue and hue, you’d’a thunk this spelling would be a Real Word™ (and thus homophonous with a much more common /-ju/ word). We should just go ahead and borrow it from French (or Javascript!) and be done with it.
• A badger’s den, homophonous with one of the most polysemous words in English.
• Makes use of a system of communication consisting of phonology, morphology, syntax, etc., and rules that constrain their interaction.
• Linguist Halliday on holiday, presumably.
• A letter of both the Ελληνικό αλφάβητο and “Ελληνικό αλφάβητο”.
• A form of reduplicative nomenclature beloved by biologists, though perhaps abused in triplicate for certain badgers, bison, giraffes, gorillas, lynxes, magpies, rats, skunks, and toads. Linguists have a more expansive definition, what with their frou-
• The internet top-
• Ivan of HPSG, and his clones
• An initialism for any of: the county seat of a shibboleth of a county in Texas, a state Down Under, a country in Africa, a country in the Middle East, or an entire continent.
• Simultaneously half of and double π.
• One who regrets.
• Homophone of one of the answers in 1 Down.
• If you adhere to the Maxims of Grice, your utterance should be this.
• An incredibly skilled performer who can engender delight and/or repugnance in an audience, esp. if French.
• Certain kinds of capacity were measured in these, in days of yore.
• A short word with a long list of parts of speech and definitions in the dictionary. Not as short as a nor as long as set, of course, but still an outlier.
• A potential friendly prefix equally at home with warriors, tourists, terrorists, activists, and fascists.
• One of the namesakes of the /ɒ/–
• Obsolete term for a kind of ship-