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Comment by martindevans | Hacker News Reader

> It's a shame to see key words be killed off by internationalisation concerns [....] I hope further research here can develop better replacements for encoding short binary strings in i18n friendly ways

I rather like the urbit way of encoding numbers. I can't remember the exact details but it's something like: There are 256 unique three letter words (all nonsense, but deliberately picked to be possible to pronounce). Each word is mapped to a byte and then a blob of binary data becomes a nonsense word.

So for example "tasfyn-partyv" instead of "1242B24A".

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This idea isn't unique to Urbit; it dates back to at least S/Key.

This sounds a bit like babble print, which is a more complex type of encoding mechanism.[0]

The first I encountered that was in SILC, where it was used to make the key fingerprint more or less pronounceable. It's interesting that the encoding scheme never really got wider attention, although it is available in both openssh and openssl.

Similar ideas come and go, and get rediscovered - so maybe now is the time for wider acceptance.

A bit of googling provided me with a nice starting point for implementations, so babble print has certainly been recognised in some circles.[1]

0: http://bohwaz.net/archives/web/Bubble_Babble.html

1: https://github.com/eur0pa/bubblepy

> deliberately picked to be possible to pronounce

That only works in English, again.

It seems like there could be a lowest-common-denominator set of phonemes that such a system could be built on, with translations into symbol groups for different languages. As long as those symbol groups are relatable by two people who speak the same language, that might be sufficient?

>> "lowest-common-denominator set of phonemes"

They already spent a bunch of time and effort finding these phonemes to build Esperanto, right?

That would probably still be a very eurocentric set of phonemes, so probably would not really be suitable for the modern multilingual world, I would think.

Esperanto was designed to be partially understandable by people across Europe by lifting words from various languages liberally.

Lojban is designed to be well-defined on phonemes, but that still only works when knowing its (rather simple) pronunciation rules.

No, see this criticism of Esperanto phonemes: http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/#b

Its choices are large, irregular, unclearly defined and basically Eastern Polish.

Or just offer different sets of phonemes for different languages (and allow easy switching). You don't need any commonality across languages.

Of course that's not helpful when two people who don't speak a common language are trying to establish communication, but it probably isn't their biggest problem.

Still western-focused, but Oren Tirosh's mnemonic encoding [1] project is pretty close as well.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com...

Similarly, proquint.

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