Re: Encode THIS in the PUA

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 01:11:33 EDT


Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at sharif dot edu> wrote:

> I can't see why they can't use a different font. Are these things
> characters? I believe they are only glyph variants.

Most of them are. The Atlantean alphabet is a little different, though.
It was not intended to be just another cipher for English, but was
designed to write the fictional Atlantean language (invented by Marc
Okrand, who also invented the Klingon language). It has separate
letters for CH, SH, and TH, which takes it out of the realm of straight
one-for-one substitution ciphers. And then there's the directionality
issue. Atlantean is written in boustrophedon style.

> BTW, this will have a single problem: people will be able to decipher
> it by cut and paste!

And for those who view these ciphers as "secret codes," that would
indeed be a pitfall.

I hope everyone noticed that I never suggested that these scripts, or
ciphers as the case may be, should be in Unicode. That said, I think
they have just as much business in a privately maintained PUA collection
as some things proposed recently, and perhaps more than others.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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