Phonetic Drop Quote II—Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 2 Contents Previous Puzzle Solutions—The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™

Rasmus Rask Puzzle XV—Gay Paree, and Points Beyond

by Lila Rosa Grau

This is the fifteenth 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. All answers should be dediacriticalized in the grid. 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 November 1st, 2024. Solutions and solvers will be announced in the next 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
Across
0
• “Voice”, 1500 kilometers northeast-by-north of the titular city.

• Not, a step, in the titular city.

• Saussure would call it parole, but this less hoity-toity term will do.

1
• Abbreviation used by every puzzle maker who find themselves with too many vowels.

• Æ.

• Where a linguistics professor’s sabbatical dreams go for approval.

• A speaker who says boobasnot, wabadebadoo and similar.

• Text abbreviation used when the speaker has enough self-awareness to realize that a humble person wouldn’t say anything.

• “Word”, in the titular city.

2
• A conjunction for when and isn’t quite enough.

• Case for when you’re just pretending to be something.

3
• Transliterate д and β to Latin and take the average, and divide the result by the mode of the letters in the name Παπασπηλιόπουλος. (abbrev.)

• An SI unit of time equal to either 8.267×10-10 fortnights, or 9.836×1014 light feet, depending on capitalization.

• Agentive suffix used in the titular city, as well as 400 kilometers north-northeast.

• “Language”, 900 kilometers east-by-north of the titular city.

4
• “Both”, 1000 kilometers southeast-by-east of the titular city.

• Finding this between morphemes is particularly hard in fusional polysynthetic languages.

5
• A Latin phrase warning the reader to pay attention, especially in New Brunswick, or North Britain. (abbrev.)

• The proper interjection to use when deploying your spice weasel.

• Proverbially, these are the electrical units that will kill you. (Scientifically, this clue is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This is not legal advice. Before receiving electric shocks, please consult your accountant or other financial advisor.)

• An internationally common word and/or initialism and/or clipping, popularized in America, of uncertain ultimate origin, but almost certainly from English or Choctaw... or Wolof or German or Greek... or maybe French or Finnish... unless it’s Latin or Old English... or Occitan or Scots. Definitely not Esperanto!

• な or ꦤ, especially when covered by 6.022×1023 atoms of sodium—assuming they are not out of stock in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.

6
• Under one of the two most popular syntactic analyses, my favorite journal is this. (abbrev.)

• Nouns of this sort refer to named individual entities.

• A punctuation mark that is neither particularly horizontal nor vertical in extent.
7
• Least interjective interjection, most appropriate at the doctor or dentist’s office.

• Mr. Protagonist of a vaguely language-themed cyberpunk novel.

• This can form compounds with block, hog, kill, rage, pizza, or trip.

• The publication of Volume VI in 2013 completed this important dialectal lexicon.

8
• Ithacan rare thing.

• Ψ.

• “You”, 900 kilometers northeast-by-east of the titular city.

• Scots for “Irish”, or English for “Scots Gaelic”, or English for “Irish”, or Scots for “ass”... some modern, some obsolete, some slang... it’s a mess out there.

9
• In OT, a constraint with this dominates another constraint.
Down
0
• To fluently decode the written representation of a language.

• A vertical punctuation mark used in Devanāgarī.

• A horizontal punctuation mark used in several writing systems.

1
• Fictional planet, billions of light years from the titular city. (Head toward the center of the universe, and look for glowing green lights; you can’t miss it!)

• Syntacticians could have taken to referring to sub-parts of their trees by this term, but somehow have not.

• Φ, transliterated.

• 2 of the 5½ vowels in English, arranged in a manner a programmer, designer, or computational linguist would recognize.

2
• A popular onomatopoetic transcription of a snake’s hiss.

• A̅.

• Ǻ – Á.

3
• Most often a homophonous orthographic clipping of a common adverb that has suffered much at the hands of English spelling; formerly the plural of that.

• A word with the same form and sound as another; sometimes subtly distinguished from cases of polysemy by having a different etymology.

4
• Factive verbs encourage speakers and hearers to do this to additional propositions.
5
• That which is covered by the acronym in #9.

• Abbreviation for that which you are reading, or “in” or “on” in or on the titular city.

• Two if by this.

• Perhaps three if by this, had the relevant event occurred two centuries later.

6
• Coordinate term perhaps used by one’s bro.

• pee:emiction::sweat::_____

• If your phonological rules do not follow this correctly, the result will be a mushy gibberish—or, perhaps, Danish.

7
• “Friend”, in the titular city.

• “Look!”, 1000 kilometers southwest-by-south from the titular city.

• A car brand that if you drop the final third of its name, transliterate the remainder into Cyrillic, capitalize it, and kern it poorly, you get back a decent approximation of its logo.

• र, ラ, ረ, ர, Ռ, or ꦫ.

8
• A head of a lexical category that does not dominate another constituent, is not dominated by that constituent, but its maximal projection does dominate the other constituent, and no barrier intervenes between them... but probably only if you are a Chomskyan.

• Textese indicating imminent action, perhaps common in the Saudi or Singaporean navies.

9
• “Summer”, in the titular city.

• An acronym that seeks to avoid blame.

• A Geordie dialect term for “look”, borrowed from Anglo-Romani, and hence a cousin to Hindi देखो.

Phonetic Drop Quote II—Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur
Previous Puzzle Solutions—The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™
SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 2 Contents