This is the fourteenth 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.
The solution will be announced in the next issue of SpecGram.
| 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 |
• Uses the interrogative mood.
• Polysemic noun beloved by Hawaiian cooks and despised by sysadmins.
• Comes in worst-
• The SpecGram website dropped this increasingly less popular web feed for articles in 2020, to the consternation of a paucal number of people.
• The oft discarded portion of French discontinuous negatives.
• Computational linguists are forced to learn how to do this, yet will never implement their own. Flavors include radix, bucket, spaghetti, and cocktail shaker.
• This
• Ema & Emi’s proposed “fowl-
• Infinitive of an auxiliary verb indicating deontic modality.
• A collective noun referring to collections of things, such as units sharing a tone contour, senses in a definition, or socially related individuals who share shibboleths.
• Preposition between M1 and O3.
• The alleged lowest form of humor, pluralized.
• Polysemic noun historically beloved by Dutch people’s feet and despised by plumbers (or rather by the people who pay them).
• A feature that /ɐ, æ, ɛ, ä, ɶ, ɒ, ɑ, ɞ, œ, ɔ, ɜ, ʌ, a/ have in common.
• High-
• Abbrev. for Jefferson City’s state.
• Ontological frenemy of has-a.
• A mythological portmanteau of a human and a goat.
• An uncommon English ligature that is commonly used in transcribing English in IPA, decoupled.
• A viper in memespeak or Volapük.
• Adjectival suffix indicating having, resembling, or being characterized by the noun it attaches to.
• Haitian Creole for head (same as the French, but with useless letters removed).
• Abbrev. for either an undergraduate degree or bovine feces, hence arguably monosemic.
• The puɴchiɴɢ baɢ of the thʀoat.
• To orally engage one’s linguistic competence, transcribed with /gret/ breadth.
• A fantasy title of address; or, a Romance copular verb; or, occasionally, Slavic cheese.
• Etymologically a conical fruit, but more often a tropical one, in Galician or Spanish.
• Lady Marmalade moved to the rouge one in 2001.
• Temperley and Sleator’s grammar flavor.
• A basic part of speech in most languages. (Probably all, but there’s a fieldworker syntactician behind a desk somewhere trying make it big by claiming, “Language X doesn’t have part of speech Y!”
• Not oft discarded non-
• A musical style with the dubious alleged etymology of speed polka.
• Often served with tatties and haggis.
• An alternative to the tree model of historical linguistics, sometimes invoked to explain areal features.
• Rappers in particular are fond of dropping this clipped piece of sound equipment.
•
• Th•y’v• b••n r•mov•d from this clu• (n•v•rth•l•ss w• can manag• to r•ad it!)
• To unacquire knowledge... or
• The knave of trumps in gleek.
• At first blush, Clio, Calliope, Erato, or Polyhymnia may seem the most relevant to linguistics, though upon reflection, Thalia (in her non-
• The Navajo alphabet seems to be particularly fond of this diacritic.