Sunday, July 29, 2012

Hugger Mugger [Chug a drugger]

Whooo! Hey people! Just felt like sharing something from my childhood!
Once upon a time ago, way back in my primary school days I had an obsession with all manner of clandestine activities: building secret bases, communication systems, concealable weapons (!), and in particular--codes! I used to revel in the idea that no one but myself could decipher the mysterious messages I left lying around.
One of my first recollections of discovering this pastime was when on one of my well-earned term breaks, I went with my family to visit my grandmother. Whenever we stayed there, I made sure to bring along tons of paper! I liked to draw random pictures, especially of fearsome monsters and rather bizarre-looking medieval warriors with well-trimmed panaches. I remember taking a great deal of interest in designing mansions full of complex and utterly impractical traps. I would also write stories and make up my own mythologies.
One time though, I apparently exhausted all the usual possibilities preventing me from boredom, and as a result I decided to do something entirely new, make up a code! This ended up being a simple substitution code which had a dual purpose of sounding rather cool when I tried to enunciate the coded words. The awesome thing was the fact that after making up this code, I never forgot it, and I remember it to this day.
There was a time during my primary and intermediate schooling when my friends also caught on to this mysterious code I was using, and us being extraterrestrial beings of a diplomatic sort, we adopted it as our common language.
I was of course rather delighted when my friends all started trying to speak in code too (I imagine we sounded like a bunch of dorks) and I found it very interesting that similar to me, they also found it very easy to memorise. Later, I figured that this was because I had designed it so that each letter of the alphabet was substituted for another one that sounded slightly similar or kind of reminded me of the original letter. This made the coded words sort of easy to pronounce.
Anyway, you'll see what I mean if you take a look at the substitution table:


A E
B P
C K
D T
E I
F V
G J
H ' (apostrophe)
I O
J G
K C
L R
M N
N M
O U
P B
Q X
R L
S Z
T D
U A
V F
W Y
X Q
Y W
Z S

As you can see its very simplistic. There is one extra rule that if there is a repeated letter, such as the 't' in letter, the repeated letter is replaced by an 'H'.
The vowels are substituted by the next vowel in the alphabet.
Originally both these rules were not the case. The vowels were exempt from substitution, but in my latter years I decided to add this to slightly improve the undecipherability.
Consonants are generally replaced with a 'similar' sounding consonant e.g. D -> T. This doesn't include the letter 'H', which is substituted by an apostrophe, obviously intended by my younger self to imitate a similar feature in French or something.
Anyway, to finish up, here's a small script which encodes a sentence using my cipher.

Enter any sentence:

Code-speak:
And that's all! Enjoy =)

Erh d'i okiklien om d'i amofilzi oz nomi! nye'e'e'e'e!

lol

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