Cryptorthography

There's an interesting article over at Linguistic Mystic, about creating new writing systems in order to conceal the meaning of what you're writing. This is something I've actually done from time to time, not necessarily to hide something I'm writing, but just as a linguistic game. It's also something that I think would be good to use in real cryptographic methods (although it would need some refinement).

Go and read the article, if you haven't already. Or skim it. In brief, you create a writing system (alphabet or whatever) or use an existing writing system, and write out the sounds of English (or whatever language you're writing in), rather than the letters. The advantage of writing out the sounds rather than the spelling is that it makes it more complex than a simple letter-substitution, and thus harder to decode. The article assumes that you'll be handwriting this stuff, which is how using an invented writing system is possible, and also gets around neatly the problem of computers doing statistical analysis on letter frequencies and so on.

Unfortunately, for practical application of this into a real encryption algorithm, there are a couple of hurdles to get over. First is the problem of phonemic transcription - we need to be able to take a word, break it into its phonemic form (the sounds), and then build it up again. While a human can do this okay most of the time, it's laborious. A machine can do it, but it there are two problems - some words are spelled the same but pronounced differently (I can read vs He read the book), and some words are pronounced the same but spelt differently (to, too, two). The scond hurdle is the problem that phonemic transcription is still open to frequency analysis - in fact, by some accounts, it makes it even easier.

Using this system, however, as a basic encryption method, before putting the text under more conventional algorithms, I feel would add an extra layer of security. Imagine someone trying to decrypt an email they've intercepted, and after finally decoding it, to discover that it's in Armenian! At least, it just looks like it's in Armenian - most people don't know any better. While the dedicated spy would seek out someone knowledgable of Armenian, who would inform them that it's just weird English, this would take time, and that's really what cryptography is - delaying the transfer of sensitive information. Here's some English in an Armenian system (I realise not everyone has Armenian language support on their computer (the fools!), so I've included an image below of what it should look like, in a slightly larger font):

Աի հօպ իտ ւարկս

However, this highlights another problem - that often there isn't a complete matching between English sounds and that of another language. For example, Armenian as it stands cannot handle English "th" sounds. What I wrote above was meant to be "I hope it works", but it might as well have been "I hope eet warks". Which looks a little like Dutch.

This is definitely an interesting area, and something I think has potential. It's especially useful as outlined in the original article, for use in a personal diary or journal. Your recipes will be safe! For the time being.