Sprachgeist Guides for the Linguist on the Go!—Part IX—Book Announcement from Panini Press SpecGram Vol CLXXXII, No 4 Contents

Cryptolinguistic Puzzle Uaxac

Mary Shapiro
Truman State University

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Across

1. Crazy chemists arm Armenia with component of speech production

14. Conjunction comes up in our genes

15. Red zone parking hides husband speaking Esperanto (or accentless Hungarian trainer)

16. Second syllable of Afghan adjective in Hausa-speaking territory

17. Crashed aviator in systematic sociolinguistic patterning?

19. I arrange (rearrange) British macs and wellies

22. Overhearer accommodates form of copula

23. Hypercorrected Cockney pronoun in first sounds of Anatolian language?

24. Like some syllables & classes, lurking wrong way in fine point

26. An old-fashioned record or a mountain at start of any alphabet

27. Nana eats one regular verb, achieves transcendent state

28. Where Johnstone’s dialect features surprisingly tight burps!

30. Trilled Scottish /r/ by Germanic house for Skinner’s first

31. Preposition acquires article in natural order of the universe.

32. Exclamation turned about in device for measuring ERPs, in short.

35. The right UR tells us, in part, a reversed semantic value

38. Doctor English to become legendary rapper and hiphop producer

40. Between hydrogen molecules, I go reply oddly in Ancient Egyptian symbol

42. Neat N-N sequence? You just don’t understand, she says.

44. Hockett loses heart, is still wildly popular.

45. Turkish official only a bit aghast

46. Relationship between syntactic nodes can do me in, sadly

49. To describe or delineate Klima, take away edges and add noun.

52. Semantic shift has worn grain, perplexed

53. Each ERP needs to be interpreted

54. Shimaore, other Bantu languages hide popular snack cookie

55. Journals have them tried so peculiarly!

57. Techy linguistic pedagogy briefly to ring or visit.

58. Zero lice scramble to form from contact

62. Hero of The Matrix, or 19th century German grammarian prefix?

63. 11-Down gets English, like Curzan

64. Adding puff of air while plundering

67. Rhode Island embraces Optimality Theory in corkscrew-shaped pasta!

70. Rocky hill (or Dutch beetle) right after dative preposition

71. Phonologist John J. messed up Hawaiian greeting!

72. International Linguistics Association follows a verb in St. Theresa’s home

74. Briefly, about literature, independent clause is unstressed and dependent.

78. Liquid fat? Old Frenchman says yes!

79. Hear Spanish (wrong!) in 2nd largest Brazilian city

80. With motto “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” can a district attorney forge multilingual nation?

81. A chariot (n.) reconstructed in IE language

82. Lobe with auditory cortex not permanent?

Down

1. Tutor gave one Dad no C for messed up vowel articulation feature in Akan.

2. Sushi, Sami, and distorted 50-down

3. Are caught between two rhotics, like OSV languages.

4. Entourage consists of English tense in (surrounding) regret

5. He kicked it around to hide publishing in Spanish

6. Alphabet edges? No, nitrogen compound.

7. Vowel change weirdly zooming into path, hon?

8. White herons, for example, about true sentence?

9. Ha! New Testament follows type of command for singsong speech

10. Scholar of sarcasm drops male identity in Japan? Yes, okay, good, got it.

11. Girl has a couple of nouns.

12. Between sundown and sunup, Afrikaans has stereotypically gendered speech act

13. Polo: oral chomping? Oh! Weird way of describing sound changes when creating new words!

18. Malayo-Polynesian flood turned over by a habitually abbreviated whaling captain

20. Dirty and vulgar in your ear? (Archaic and out of order?)

21. A large adjective for seaweed?

25. Greek letter or number before University? Or more Italian with accent?

29. Black street speech expert covers universal grammar with expression of contempt

33. Spanish was taking a long period of time

34. Irene has comeback in empty Gaelic, referring to whole class.

35. Radioactive chemical used for tests shows effects of movement, right?

36. Has sex with, for instance, linguists Shuy and Fowler, colloquially

37. In Nahuatl, a locative construction for a rain and fertility god

39. Odd (wrong) about English to give Spanish finger

41. Italian citations and imitations contain Spanish feminine diminutive

43. Presently, no labiovelar!

44. Modern Indo-European language hid in a mess

47. Italian honey, maiden lies oddly

48. No surrounding a preposition in medical order to withhold food and drink

50. A Farsi speaker, perhaps, darted between two of me?

51. Men with limited English become yellow in Brittany

56. Not quite so long, not quite so long, teaching non-natives

59. Russian, Albanian, Ingush, Latvian initially form horizontal bar

60. Sicilian province returns from 63-Across

61. Object number one: find devil in Japan

65. Freeware for analyzing speech may speak in Dutch

66. Extinct Arawakan language like nation going crazy without end

68. Nothing (zip!) around casual greeting in U.S. state

69. Soft mineral dug up in (Slavic) Latvia

72. Confused air for Albanian bear (or Ilocano king)

73. Maldivian, just somewhat towards the end, passing through.

74. C-Command abbreviates, but loses nothing in a cubic centimeter.

75. Large adjective and preposition combine into place to sit (on someone)

76. To cover with sticky substancethanks, right?

77. Halliday and Hidasi hid same woman (like NAACP founder Wells)


Like other cryptic crosswords, the clues in this puzzle are not straightforward. Unlike most, however, this one focuses mainly on languages and linguistics. For instance, the clue for Zapotec might be “Oto-Manguean variety alters pez coat” (anagram of pez coat), or “Indigenous Mexican language to destroy overtime prior to European Commission” (ZAP + O.T. + E.C.), or “a nice top, a zany blouse conceals retro Oaxacan language” (niCE TOP, A Zany), or many other combinations of puns, anagrams, or typographic quirks. Punctuation in clues is often misleading. Each clue contains both a definition (of sorts) and a more cryptic part, but these may come in any order.

If you can complete (or make a good effort on) the crossword and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by October 15th, 2018, you could win some SpecGram merch. The correct solution and winners, if any, will be announced in the next issue of Speculative Grammarian.



The solution to last month’s puzzle, A Panoply of Stupid Hijinks, is autosegmental. The common trait among the answers is that each contains three letters in a row in alphabetical order (allowing a to follow z). The answer to each clue, properly aligned, is below.

[z a b]a(gl)ione
[T u v]alu
[s t u]dents
mo[n o p]hthong
fi[r s t]
[d e f]inite
A[f g h]anistan
ca[l m n]ess
[d e f]ective
gy[m n o]sperm
[s t u]ttering
si[z a b]le
[K L M]

Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch:

Lydia NewkirkAdam HesterbergScott Horne

Sprachgeist Guides for the Linguist on the Go!Part IXBook Announcement from Panini Press
SpecGram Vol CLXXXII, No 4 Contents