Re: OT: cyphers (was: aliens!)
From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
Date: | Sunday, December 9, 2007, 1:25 |
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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