Double-Dot Wide Ling d’Ꙫ-ku—Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 1 Contents Previous Puzzle Solutions—The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™

Rasmus Rask Zigzag Puzzle XVIII

by Lila Rosa Grau

This is the eighteenth 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 zigzag down the grid to provide a framework for filling in the answers.

Complete the puzzle and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by September 28th, 2025. The correct solution and solvers, if any, will be announced in the next issue.

0  1  2  3  4 R 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
• Unit of syllable weight.

• Frequency class for words like floccinaucinihilipilification.

• Language/species of ’90s-era SpecGram contributor Saxtorph.

1
• Abbrev. pronounced letter by letter, such as /ˈɛf.biː.aɪ/.
2
• Lopsided win.

• Saintly abbreviation often canonized in dictionaries.

• Online overshare.

3
• Another name for an unattached circumflex.

• An abso-bloomin’-lutely fascinating phenomenon.

4
• Congregational “so be it.”

• The list that comes before the food.

• Small bills.

• Cozy bird home.

5
• Command-line text editor that won’t quit.

• This principle says L1 learners set parameters so as to generate the smallest language compatible with their input.

• One of myriad ways to write /uː/ in English—now there’s some orthographic depth!

6
• Club with more projectors than popularity.

• Jagged Hawaiian lava, or an alternate to ā in some orthographies.

• Field where linguistics sometimes gets parked, to scientists’ chagrin.

• Grammatical concord (abbr.).

7
• Tense that makes historical linguists feel at home.

• Broad Scottish valley.

• World of The Dark Crystal.

8
• Prepositionally keen on.

• Jazz syllables.

• It’s not you, in a playground game.

9
• Nerdy QWERTY alternative.

• Syllabic constituent, not Jack Frost’s hobby.
Down
0
• Space station named for peace.

• Old-school online chat where turn-taking was... aspirational.

• Spanish bubbly, or a major vein.

• Lacking in flavor, fizz, or interesting conversational implicature.

1
• Hawaiian fish that’s so tasty it has multiple names—guess which one!

• Friend, en français.

• Tsar who preceded Peter in birth, in death, and alphabetically (in Russian and English), but followed him numerically, and, for a while, was monarchically coincident with him.

2
• Tiny U.S. state (abbr.).

• Philologist’s favorite old-fashioned prefix of origin, or a modern genitive pronoun.

• The thing.GEN that some storytellers like to start in the middle of.

• Reviewer #2’s way to say “about,” for maximal gravitas.

3
• A pragmatic hedge, such as kind of, a bit, and others.
4
• Academic citations format from the ’80s.

• Soak site with claw feet, maybe.

• What you say when phonetics fieldwork takes you to Siberia in January.

• Public-key encryption scheme named for its inventors.
5
• Common verb that’s only two phonemes long, changes its vowel in the past, and has a no-longer-productive past participle form.

• Superlative quantifier: greater than many, less than all.

• Place to pile books, often messy in the singular, but usually well tended in the plural.

6
• Regex operator meaning 0+.
7
• Teenage blemish.

• Possessive pronoun that editors fight to keep apostrophe-free.

• A collection in math, or the word with the most dictionary senses.

• God of depths and water—possibly of little use to linguists since Finnish is orthographically not very deep.

8
• Doctrine, tendency, or suffix that loves to attach itself.

• Umami-rich soup base.

• Word with no repeated letters.

9
• Form placeholder for those with even less to share than Harry Truman.

• Fine spray at close range.

• What every corpus linguist needs more of.

Double-Dot Wide Ling d’Ꙫ-ku—Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur
Previous Puzzle Solutions—The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™
SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 1 Contents