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

On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 09:51:40AM +0100, Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
[snip]
> honest, I still have no idea. But since the whole thing is just fantasy anyway,
> I think I may forgive myself a few historical improbabilities.
Or you can learn from the way I sculpted Ferochromon, the Ebisedian
conworld. In terms of its external history, it arose from many scraps and
incomplete story fragments that I've created since I was a child. The
earliest fragment I remember could be as early as when I was 11 or 12. A
lot of these fragments (or more accurately, almost all of them) had things
that contradicted each other. So imagine what I got when, half a decade
ago, I suddenly got this (crazy?) idea of unifying it all, and basically
pieced them together like a mosaic. (Except that in a real mosaic the
pieces actually fit quite well. :-P)

I'm still working on smoothing out the edges and hiding the seams, but as
things stand right now, there are a lot of historical improbabilities. :-)

[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

Reply