Re: OT: cyphers (was: aliens!)

I've used variations of the Pigpen Cipher as a con-script for years.  It was
my second one ever, in fact.  I turned into a featural Tengwarish script
that wound up looking like Hebrew.

It works like this: take the phonemic consonant sounds (sans affricates,
which I treat as stop+fricative sequences), and pair up the stops and
fricatives that differ only in voice:

/p/ + /b/
/t/ + /d/
/f/ + /v/
/k/ + /g/
/s/ + /z/
/S/ + /Z/
/T/ + /D/

That's only seven slots out of the grid, so I added the nasals and liquids,
arbitrarily putting /n/ and /r/ in the "voiceless" column:

/n/ + /m/
/r/ + /l/

That left four consonants in my (English-inspired) inventory, /j/, /h/, /w/,
and /N/, which I put in that order by mapping them to YHWH (/h/ and /N/ are
the same phoneme, right? :))

So, take the nine pairs, alphabetize according to the earliest member of the
pair, and put them into the tic-tac-toe grid; the dotted ones are the
"voiced" sound:

/p/+/b/   /t/+/d/   /f/+/v/
/k/+/g/   /r/+/l/    /n/+/m/
/s/+/z/   /S/+/Z/  /t/+/D/

Then put the last four clockwise into the cross:

       /j/
/N/         /h/
      /w/

Vowels are represented by diacritics placed either under the previous
consonant or over the following, whichever fits a given circumstance better:
circumflex for /a/, acute accent for /e/, grave accent for /i/, overdot for
/o/, and macron for /u/.

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