basic fun: ciphers

If you had known me when I was in 5th grade, you would have been able to predict that I would become a language maniac. I kept checking out Herbert Zim's book Codes and Secret Writing from the school library, over and over again. I believe an interest in alphabets and ciphers is one of the early signs that someone is going to become a langmaker. Unfortunately none of my friends wanted to exchange coded messages with me. We didn't have any secrets that really required such measures.

A couple of weeks ago I was perusing the unicode.org website when I happened to find the Myanmar (formerly known as Burmese) character set. Before I knew what hit me, I was gripped by an urge to use some of those characters as a cipher for encoding English. It ran through my brain like wildfire, absorbing every free moment for three days. I even had a dream about it. Still tweaking it. I like the result; it's ultra attractive to me, but I don't know if I will use it much. Still don't have any secrets.