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

Rasmus Rask Parallel Puzzle XIX

by Lila Rosa Grau

This is the nineteenth 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 two parallel diagonals are given to provide a framework for filling in the answers.

Complete the puzzle and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by December 15th, 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
• When dialects stop talking to each other.
1
• A single entry in the mental lexicon, or something you forgot at the store.

• What a semanticist is always looking for, but statisticians always find.

• A particle that’s negatively charged, like reviewers’ comments.

2
• The route your /h/ takes before it disappears.
3
• Speakers of OE, similarly abbreviated.

• The best kind of mot.

• A child’s belly, especially when reduplicated or in the diminutive.

• ν.

4
• A carpenter’s tool for ensuring a right-branching sentence structure.

• 🔥 – fi + 🚌.

5
• 2p in Romance.

• 2p in txtese.

• A blunt instrument, or a place that’s terrible for studying phonetics.

• The presupposition your dataset swears it doesn’t have.

6
• A retired Retta-speaking soaker of flax who chases Vietnamese centipedes in Hungarian meadows with Friulian nets would be especially familiar with this orthographic syllable.

• Old English letter that, phonetically speaking, this clue ends with.

• Possessive pronoun for thee, but not for me.

• A praiseful song with a silent ⟨n⟩, much to orthoëpists’ chagrin.

• Three letters of the Latin alphabet, in sequence.

7
• Fictional stories told by an unreliable narrator (or a syntax student).

• “What’s up?”, phonologically reduced.

• Archaic suffix denoting the realm or jurisdiction of a king, bishop, or abbot.

8
• Theoretical common ground we all argue about (abbr.).

• The S in STEM (abbr.).

• A color named for a duck.

• Poetic English interjection used to simulate the vocative.

9
• A syllable’s nucleus, or a mountain’s high point.

• Extended monologue with minimal turn-taking.
Down
0
• An often chronic or critical prefix meaning “through” or “across”.

• Grammatical role or characteristic, for short.

• 2p in clipped £.

1
• An inflammatory suffix?

• Used to dab away tears after grading a particularly egregious Ling 101 homework assignment.

• A critical factor in second language acquisition.

2
• A word that does something about it.

• English bigram that’s always together.

• Precursor to ♪ do ♪.

• Annual migration of linguists (abbr.).

3
• A burst that silences electronics (abbr.).

• A marsupial’s pocket.

• A possibly folk etymologized diacritič, with hat-.

4
• How an ewt, historically, became a newt.
5
• It’s neither a liquid nor a solid.

• Make chords, but not with your vocal cords.

• Like the ⟨b⟩ in debt or the ⟨k⟩ in know.
6
• Hilarity will often do this, according to the meme lore.

• 1,000,000,000 (abbr.).

• Latin for “according to Reviewer #2”.

7
• We are the Knights Who Say, “Noun, Inanimate!”

• ?

8
• Lexical brother-in-law, etymologically speaking (abbr.).

• An animal with a silent initial consonant—but only if you are phonotactically a coward.

• A fish that sounds like part of a sneeze.

• Discourse marker of divine revelation.

9
• A direction only found on a compass of 16 or more winds.

• The objective case for the authors of a paper.

• [Thus] indicating a deliberately reproduced error.

• A semiotic sign that resembles its referent.

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