New York Times, Monday, December 12, 2016

Modern language study was my favorite academic pursuit in high school and college (though I ended up majoring in economics). I learned Spanish and French as a student, basic German when I was stationed in Heidelberg in the military, and even a bit of tourist Italian. When I started constructing crosswords, I made sure that the 100 or so most common words of several languages were in my word list (to the occasional dismay of some editors). I've used language gimmicks in several puzzles (recently-used answer/clue: TRE — "It's overdue in Italia"). I even did a novelty puzzle in which every single entry (or its clue) was in a language other than English or involved something outside the U.S.

This puzzle has six languages from five different language groups (all Eurasian), with Hindi and Urdu being forms of Hindustani differentiated only by their alphabets and regional/specialty vocabulary. A total of 13 answers are involved with the theme, which makes it undoubtedly the most theme-intensive puzzle I've done. This made for a challenging incidental fill, which was improved a bit with some prodding from Will. I suspect most solvers will figure out the theme early on, but since there's no clue which languages go where, there's still some puzzling to do.

Six literal foreign LANGUAGE BARRIERs today, a black square breaking up HIN/DU, UR/DU, etc. It's a ton of theme material to work with, and it was fun to see so many different languages. I especially liked the longer ones — POL/ISH and GER/MAN, since it's really easy to work in short chunks such as TH and AI.

Not a surprise that Mark went up to the max of 78 words, given the high theme density. He uses his black squares pretty well to separate his themers, but it does make for a fairly fractured grid. There's a big chunk of puzzle in the upper right, another one in the lower right, and a diagonal running from the NW to SE, with the three sections barely connected. This type of layout makes constructing much easier, since you can tackle each chunk one at a time, but it made for a pretty choppy solve for me.

Also a ton of tough vocabulary and names. I don't think there was anything unfair, but I wonder if TOPOL, LILLE, and MASUR might turn off some newer solvers.

Throw in some crossword glue of DO A, HUIT, I LAY, YELLO (only one way to clue it), RIAA, and it didn't feel as elegant as I like a Monday puzzle to be.

I did enjoy the bonuses of MERCUTIO and GIFT SHOP, though. Tough to work in long bonus entries with so much already going on, so that was appreciated.

It would have been really cool to employ very long languages, using more colorful entries — aMANDA / RINgtone, lifeSPAN / ISHmael, gentleBEN / GALIleo, etc. — but I did like seeing so many languages from around the globe worked in.

Now to figure out how to make AZERBAIJANI work with this theme ...