Pigpen/Masonic/Poundex

From: Chris Jacobs (chris.jacobs@freeler.nl)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 23:02:43 EDT

  • Next message: John Cowan: "Re: Pigpen/Masonic/Poundex"

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
    To: "Miikka-Markus Alhonen" <Miikka-Markus.Alhonen@tigatieto.com>
    Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>
    Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 7:38 PM
    Subject: Re: Colourful scripts

    > Miikka-Markus Alhonen scripsit:
    >
    > > Anyone interested in preparing an encoding proposal?
    >
    > This is awfully marginal, it seems to me, not so much because of the
    colors
    > (which are letter features, like crossbars, bowls, etc. in other scripts),
    > but because except for "gb" (which is effectively a single grapheme,
    > "g" being otherwise unused), this looks very much like an encipherment
    > of the Latin-based orthography.
    >
    > The pigpen/Masonic cipher (see
    > http://www.gchq.gov.uk/codebreaking/answers3.html for one common variant
    > -- there are many) is analogous, though suited to English rather than Edo.

    But how _do_ you code pigpen in unicode?

    It is indeed clear that it should not be considered another alphabet but
    just a font for the latin alphabet, and that it thusly should get no own
    codepoints.

    But you still need to pick one of the variants as the _plaintext_ (in
    crypto sense) variant, and then you can deem the others to be crypted by
    monoalphabetic substitution.

    I think the variant used in FAM-Code.ttf is a good choice for the plaintext
    variant.

    http://www.odr.org/anonymous/fam-code.htm

    > --
    > All Norstrilians knew what laughter was: John Cowan
    > it was "pleasurable corrigible malfunction".
    http://www.reutershealth.com
    > --Cordwainer Smith, _Norstrilia_ jcowan@reutershealth.com
    >
    >



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