OT: cyphers (was: aliens!)

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote at 2007-12-08 16:35:42 (+0100)
 >
 > 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.


I've seen this under various names in English.  The Wikipedia entry is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigpen_cipher

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