Category Archives: private or secret

Gyaru-moji — 2000 AD?, Japan

Posted on September 28, 2011 by ducky

Gyaru-moji is sort of like a Japanese Leet: a variant orthography for Japanese.  Unlike Leet, which was developed in the predominantly male hacker culture, Gyaru-moju (which means “girl characters”) appears to have been developed by schoolgirls.  In both cases, by … Continue reading →

Posted in Logograms, private or secret, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", significant female influence, Syllabaries | Leave a comment

Leet — ~1980 AD, USA

Posted on September 27, 2011 by ducky

Leet, also known as “1337” is a writing system developed for the English language which gains some of its value in being difficult to understand — but not too difficult.  It is in some respects a code-substitution cipher, where glyphs … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, private or secret, Rating: 3 "I did not know that" | 1 Comment

Punjabi Landa — 900 AD, India

Posted on April 5, 2011 by ducky

As I mentioned in the Khudawadi post yesterday, merchants simplified Sharada, presumably to let them write more quickly.  In addition to dropping the vowel diacritics, they also used the same character for aspirated (“breathy”) and non-aspirated consonants, and dropped punctuation … Continue reading →

Posted in Abugida, mercantile script, private or secret, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting" | 2 Comments

Nushu — 1300 AD?, China

Posted on March 14, 2011 by ducky

While Hiragana and Hangul were considered “women’s scripts”, nobody actively prevented the men from using the script as well, and eventually the men came around.  However, in China, women were actively prevented from learning Chinese script, so they went underground … Continue reading →

Posted in Logograms, private or secret, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", significant female influence, Syllabaries | 2 Comments