page ten

The Codex

Today's number has invented a language and a way of writing it down. A handful of consonants, a handful of vowels, a rule about what a syllable is allowed to look like, and a glyph for every sound — all grown on the same little lattice of strokes, so the whole alphabet looks like one hand made it. Type English into the slab and it comes back out carved. Tomorrow none of these letters will mean anything.

The slab

Every English word is coined into the day's language by hashing the word itself, so the same word always comes out the same — and a plural is built from its own singular.

Punctuation carries over: a comma becomes a point, a full stop becomes a double bar.

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Ink
Hand

The alphabet

Consonants are labelled in grey, vowels in blue. Each glyph is two to four strokes drawn between points on a three-by-four lattice, every stroke starting somewhere an earlier stroke already touched — which is why they hang together instead of looking like scribbles.

Language
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Script
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Seed
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Inventory
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Kind
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Reads
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Syllable
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Plurals
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Word order
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Letterform
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A starter lexicon

Twenty-four words the day happens to have. Nothing is looked up in a table: each one is the same coining function the slab uses, handed an English gloss.

How a language gets dealt

  1. 01

    Choose the sounds

    Ten to seventeen consonants and five to seven vowels are drawn from a larger pool, then a smaller set is picked out as the only sounds allowed to close a syllable. Some days nothing may, and every word comes out open and vowel-ended.

  2. 02

    Grow the letters

    The script gets one set of habits — how curved its strokes are, how far they lean, whether they carry serifs, whether every letter hangs off a shared stem or headline. Each glyph is then grown under those habits, so they are siblings rather than strangers.

  3. 03

    Coin on demand

    There is no dictionary. An English word is hashed together with the day's seed and that number builds a pronounceable word out of the day's sounds. Ask twice, get the same answer; ask tomorrow, get a stranger.

The same date integer that drifts the field on the front page, seeds the Garden, writes the Chimes, deals the Lattice, names the town in the Almanac, scatters the Observatory, raises the coast in the Atlas, chooses the founding animal of the Menagerie and lights the star in the Orrery also decided every letter on this page. Ten rooms, one number. The Almanac has been filing reports in English from a town that does not exist; this is the alphabet it should have been using.