Re: aliens!

B Garcia skrev:
> On Dec 7, 2007 3:09 PM, John Campbell
> <campbell.2006@...> wrote:
>> I found that planet 21 looked like pictographs, 5 looked
>> like a game of tic tac toe. 2 looks interesting. Maybe a
>> conscript could use system with a tic tac toe sort of
>> background where depending on where the dot is would
>> change the meaning. It's probably already been done,
>> though.
>
>
> I honestly would not be surprised if that's true. You
> could get quite a few phonemes out of a tic-tac-toe grid.
There is a 'cypher', especially popular with boyscouts,
called _brädgårdschiffret_ 'the lumberyard cypher'in
Swedish which works by placing the letters of the alphabet
in three tic-tac-toe grids and then using segments of the
grid as letters, using diacritic dots to distinguish yhe
three groups. An illustration with text in Swedish is at
<http://tinyurl.com/3b59af>
<http://www.morlandascoutkar.se-/scoutfakta/chiffer/bradgard.asp>

As they point out it is more effective if the order of the
alphabet is scrambled! The cultural impact of this 'cypher'
is illustrated by the fact that some Swedes call the #
symbol _brädgård_ 'lumberyard'.

There is a variant which uses two tic-tac-toe grids and one
X-shaped grid, plus diacritic dot, thus reaching 26 letters.
In my teens I used a variant of that with 'phonetic' value
assignments inspired to Tolkien's Tengwar table and my
budding phonetics knowledge. The tic-tac-toe grid contained
the consonants of Swedish and the X grid the vowels:

:                  .                 .
:      _|_|_     _|_|_     \/        \/
:      _|_|_     _|_|_     /\        /\
:       | |       | |
:
:      k t p     g d b     i         8
:      C s f     j l v    y e       u a
:      N n m     x r w     2         o

Plus additional letters looking like + for /h/ and x for
/E/. So _brädgård_ would be written:

:    .  ._    .    .    ._  .
:    |_ | | X |_| _| /\ | | |_|

I also took to rounding off the letter shapes to be similar
to Roman capitals, like U = /t/, O = /s/, C = f and so on
(/C/ was a turned C, /n/ an upside-down U etc.) and to
replace the dots with extra lines, /m/ looking like Greek
Gamma and "/w/" like F, /l/ like Theta, /8/ like W, /o/ like
M etc. and in one development the vowels became diacritics
above the consonants, with an I shape as carrier for vowels
not following a consonant.


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
   à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
   ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
   c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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