Re: Hattic script (was: T-Shirt Take 2)

WOW!
Do you have any samples of this script you can scan and pput online?  I'd
love to see something Roman-based with that many symbols.
-M



wrote:

> [snip]
> > > It resembled me my toying with alphabets when I was a schoolboy.
> [snip]
>
> Heh... reminds me of *my* schoolboy days (boy, why do I suddenly feel so
> old? :-P) when I was an Ultima addict (Ultima is a series of RPG games for
> the computer). They used a runic alphabet, which inspired me to create my
> own alphabets. I thought it was neat that they had letters like thorn
> which stood for "TH" (in my childish ignorance, it never occurred to me at
> the time that "TH" was in fact a single phone, though it was written as
> two letters). I thought it was a neat shorthand. That inspired a "secret"
> script which contained a lot of letters for frequent English letter
> combinations.  (Part of the motivation was to defeat frequency analysis by
> "absorbing" frequent letters like "e" into unique combinations.)
>
> Of course, at the time I wasn't too creative about letterforms, having
> only ever seen the English alphabet and Chinese characters---and I wasn't
> going to attempt using Chinese characters because they were too complex
> for me to handle at the time. So I just took the existing English
> letterforms, and applied a fixed geometric transformation on them to
> produce my "secret code" letterforms. For the double letters like TH, EA,
> EE, etc., I deliberately used English letter lookalikes, just so it would
> mislead the less bright among the would-be crackers of my secret code.
>
> I also threw in numerical glyphs as well, and was insane enough to use
> base-16 instead of base-10. And to make things more complex, I invented a
> special symbol which would force numerals to be interpreted in base-10.
> Anyone that didn't realize that would be quite confused by my coded
> numbers. :-) (But now that I've said it in public, it's probably a dead
> giveaway :-P)
>
> Of course, not being content with obscuring just letters and numbers, I
> went on to invent glyphs for punctuation as well as spaces. (Yes, I
> actually had a non-blank symbol that stands for a blank.) So something
> written in this code would appear to be just a big block of symbols, but
> it would actually contain fully-punctuated text, sometimes with the odd
> mathemtical equation. (Yes, there were quite a few mathematical symbols,
> but I didn't get very far with that.)
>
> A later secret code system I had carried this obscurity even further: I
> decided that "e"'s were still too common, even after I replaced sequences
> like EA and EE with single symbols; so I turned all vowels into
> diacritics, and when written in a slightly different position, they also
> implied the presence of an "e". Then for some common consonants, I created
> a "full" form and a "ligature" form; the full form was used when the
> consonant appeared alone, and the ligature form was used in consonant
> clusters.
>
> Then I had a ligature for indicating word breaks, thus dispensing with the
> need to have spaces; however, I *still* kept glyphs for spaces, *and* also
> allowed an actual space to be used in place of the glyph. So there are
> actually 3 different ways of representing a space: an actual space on the
> page, or a standalone symbol, or a little hook on the previous letter.
> Well, actually, any combinations of these 3 methods are also possible,
> since it doesn't hurt to represent a blank space twice--it's still a blank
> space. So there are actually 7 distinct ways of writing a space, 4 of
> which are quite redundant but good for confusing would-be code breakers.
> :-P Good luck to whoever tries to determine word boundaries.
>
> Also, there were symbols for pronouns and various forms of the verb to-be,
> since they occurred too frequently for my liking. Interestingly, I
> differentiated between singular and plural 2nd person pronouns, even
> though the code was meant to represent English text. This was the
> beginnings of my conlanging tendencies, maybe? :-)
>
> I've actually stopped using this secret code for a long time now, and may
> have, in fact, forgotten parts of it (so I'm going to have a lot of fun
> deciphering my own writings later, when I look back at some of my old
> notes and diaries. :-P) But many of these ideas still live on in the
> Ebisedian writing system, except without the deliberately obscure
> features. Ebisedian writing isn't meant to be obscure. :-)
>
>
> T
>
> --
> Knowledge is that area of ignorance that we arrange and classify. -- Ambrose
> Bierce
>
>

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